Owl and the Japanese Circus (34 page)

“Thirty percent. I lost a life first time round finding that trap. And I didn’t fuck up. You disappeared off the grid.”

He caught me midsip of soda, and I had to stop myself spitting a
mouthful over my keyboard. “Fuck me, thirty percent. If you’d sent me the map in the first place, I would’ve told you there was a demigod sitting behind door number three and saved you the trouble of dying.” I added, “And I go off the grid all the time! That’s no excuse to chase me down.”

“You were kidnapped midgame off Interstate 15 outside Vegas.”

I sat up, and my soda careened onto the carpet. I didn’t care. Lady Siyu could clean it up. “You son of a bitch, you’ve been tracking me from day one?”

“I didn’t start tracking you until I figured out you were running from vampires. And for the record, I didn’t ‘chase you down.’ I called because I was worried.”

“From day one we agreed to play anonymously.”

“And you went with that? No wonder you’ve got vampires chasing you.”

I took my headset off and hit the mute button. I didn’t want to hear it. I was too pissed. Besides, there’s only so much profanity the World Quest filter takes before you get a black spot on your card. When you get to five, you’re banned for a week. I was at four again.

The text box lit up with yet another message.
Hey, I was only trying to help—I’m your friend, or at least I thought that’s what we were. Before I knew you were the kind of person who’
d screw me over for a lousy 20%—

A bell alerted us that our third party member, Paul the Monk, was entering the game. The dialogue box I had open with Carpe flashed again.

This conversation isn’t over,
Carpe wrote.

Oh yes it is,
I wrote right back before closing the window and putting my headset back on. I checked my email inbox while I was at it. Still nothing from Mr. Kurosawa.

“Hey Byz,” Paul the Monk’s middle-aged voice rang in my headset. It was the kind of voice I imagined belonged to a guy who spent most of his weekends corralling kids to soccer games in a minivan. “Carpe filling you in on our dungeon?”

“You mean how he wants to fuck us over for a lousy twenty percent?”

Paul laughed. “Told you she wouldn’t go for it,” he said.

“Oh, don’t tell me he’s got you roped into this death trap too, Paul? You realize he just wants the treasure because he thinks someone is going to sell him a resurrection charm—”

“He said he has it, and he comes with recommendations—” Carpe chimed in.

“Yeah, from the guys who are going to be waiting outside the Blue Beard to jump you for your gold—”

“Come on, Byz. It’ll shut him up. And he agreed to that castle we’ve had our eye on,” Paul said.

I swore under my breath. How could they be so stupid? I needed to find the guys hanging out at the Blue Beard and get in on the scam. If it was this easy to convince people to show up on your doorstep with a pile of gold . . . “Fine, three-way split.”

“Come on . . .” Carpe tried.

“One more squeak out of you and I raise my price to fifty percent.”

“Deal. Carpe?” Paul asked.

“Not a peep more,” Carpe said.

I was still pissed, but I wanted to play. Besides, Paul was there now, so that would keep the game conversation generic. I could berate Carpe later. It’s odd that out of the two people I hang with on a more than weekly basis, one of them knew way too much about me, and the other was clueless and probably spent half his game time figuring how to sneak a beer while still watching his kids. Where the hell was the balance in my life?

We headed into Ah Puch’s tomb. Paul the Monk stepped on a poison trap, and we ran into a pack of goblins who’d followed Carpe in on his first solo run and set up shop. As a general rule I don’t like killing things, even in a game . . . except for goblins.

Besides that, and the occasional text prompt from Carpe (I closed them as soon as they flashed in the lower left corner of my screen), and
me checking my inbox for a message from Mr. Kurosawa, 3:00 a.m. passed uneventfully.

At 4:00 a.m. we hit the third level.

“All right boys,” I said. “This is where things get tricky. One of you needs to stand on that block while the other two go get the treasure.”

“How stupid do you think we are?” Carpe said, sounding like he had a mouthful of food. I’d always pictured Carpe as a scrawny guy, but it dawned on me he could be a fat computer guy.

“No seriously, one of you needs to stand here on that block, otherwise I can’t open the secret passage at the end of this hall.”

There was silence from the other two.

“Oh, come on. One of you will be with me, and I can’t steal all the treasure.”

Paul snorted.

I sighed for Carpe and Paul’s benefit. I thought about ordering room service; I was going to need coffee and breakfast soon. “Look, guys, decide between yourselves, but one of you has to either stand on that block or go back and grab a hundred and twenty pounds’ worth of goblin corpses. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Byzantine, this isn’t—” Carpe started.

I muted the mic, took off my headset, and picked up the number to dial room service.

“Hello?” answered the prim voice on the other end.

“Hi there, I need breakfast and coffee—preferably something with espresso in it. What do you have?”

After I was done ordering I put my headset back on. “Well boys, what did you decide?”

“I’ll stay here. Paul will go with you,” Carpe said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic about it. I wondered how Paul had won that round. I thought about asking Carpe in our dialogue box, but I decided against it. I didn’t want to give him the impression I’d cooled down yet. Son of a bitch, tracking me behind my back.

“Fine. Carpe, stand on that red tile,” I said, and used my cursor to indicate the right one. “Paul, you’re with me.”

We reached the halfway point down the hall towards the door of death. I stopped at the wall and looked for the right set of mosaic patterns, the ones I’d had to memorize from my grad school textbook on Mayan temples and deities.

“Gimme a sec, Paul, I need to solve this puzzle.”

It was a series of numbers that had to be entered perfectly to open an adjacent passage, otherwise a fireball would launch from the opposing wall . . . or was it spears? Anyway, if you screwed up, something bad shot out. On the off chance you dodged that, a trapdoor opened underneath. I had no idea what was under the trapdoor. As far as I knew, no one did.

I was on the final sequence of equations when my inbox chimed. A message from Mr. Kurosawa had come in. I stopped midpunch to skim the message.

I have looked at all six sets of inscriptions. Though I echo your suspicions that this is derived from one of the languages you so quaintly refer to as “supernatural,” it is not a form I am familiar with. In the future, direct your inquiries through Lady Siyu or Oricho.

“Shit.” He couldn’t translate it. Any of it. I’d let a dragon beat the shit out of me, and it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. I was back where I started. Nowhere. Now what the hell was I going to do?

“Byzantine?” Paul said.

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the game. I did the second-to-last equation in my head and pressed the tile with the Mayan five, written in red ochre. The treasure room door slid open a crack to the right of the Mayan tiles. “Sorry, Paul—out-of-game stuff. This will just take me a few more seconds.”

“No worries, I can relate,” he said, and chuckled.

I can’t,
wrote Carpe.

I frowned and closed the text box. Snarky bastard. Another one popped up in its place.

Sooooo . . . how long have you been running from vampires?

Son of a bitch wasn’t going to let it drop.
Stop it. I come here to get away from my day job, not talk about it.

You know, you might be the most famous archaeologist on the planet. You should see what comes up in a Google search.

Will you stop! Someone might read this.

Relax, I’ve got the line secured.

Smug little bastard.
Don’t want to hear it—If I can’t trust you to keep your word, how the hell am I supposed to trust you outside, let alone in-game?
I closed the text box as soon as I clicked Send. Another one appeared.

Ummm Owl
—Carpe started, but I closed the box before he could finish. Another popped up, this time on my laptop, overshadowing the rest of the screen.

No Owl, seriously, why is Paul casting Monk’s Fist?

What the—?

I focused back on the game screen. Sure enough, Paul’s monk was getting ready to cast Monk’s Fist, a melee attack able to rip out an opponent’s heart in one shot.

“Paul,” I yelled into my headset. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Sorry, kid, but if I kill you, I get the experience points and the treasure. I’ll reach the Blue Beard before Carpe and buy that resurrection charm.”

“Oh, not you too—”

“Nothing personal, but I’ve got a job and three kids. I don’t have the luxury of scourging these places all day like you losers.”

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been playing with Paul for six months, and he’d blindsided me. “You lying, cheating, bigoted son of a bitch—just because we don’t have lousy time-management skills doesn’t mean we don’t have real job shit to do too. Grow a pair of fucking balls and tell your goddamned kids to drive themselves to soccer—” I kept going, but the World Quest PG buzzer went off.

“Son of a bitch,” I yelled, though only Carpe and World Quest’s version of the FTC could hear me now. It would be a cold day in hell before I let Carpe pick team members again.

I watched as Paul’s avatar readied to throw Monk’s Fist at my Byzantine. I did what any respectful thief does. Dodge. The fist caught my hood but didn’t deliver any damage.

I pulled up the secure message box with Carpe.
Carpe, get your ass teleported over here now. Paul’s gone rogue.

I hit Enter as Paul readied another fist. Damn it, I wish I’d bothered to learn how many strikes a monk had on special attacks . . .

Carpe’s voice came over my headset. “I set up a private line.”

“Good, ’cause World Quest FTC just booted me out. I didn’t even deserve it this time.”

“I’ll be there in less than a minute. Keep him busy.”

“How the hell do you suggest I do that?” I said, as I ran the Byzantine Thief through a series of flips and rolls that placed a batch of poison arrows between her and the bastard rogue monk. Paul’s avatar didn’t falter as the arrows hit. Instead, he readied his staff.

Shit, monks had poison resistance. I was totally fucked. All Paul had to do was hit me once, that’s all it takes to kill a thief. Unless . . .

The secret passage door was ajar, but I still had one more number to press on the tile set for it to slide the whole way open. My guess was that Paul figured he could pry it open after he looted my avatar’s body. He was dead wrong.

“I’m going to try something stupid, Carpe,” I said into the mic.

I targeted the wall and pressed Enter. Byzantine rolled for the sequence, catching a kick on her leg that knocked my health bar down by a third. My avatar still managed to slam into the Mayan number five instead of the nine.

The game screen began to rumble as pieces behind the tomb walls began to slide. Two large slabs of rock slammed down and blocked off both ends of the tunnel, trapping me and the monk. Poison arrows flew from above, then from the side, in a repeating pattern. Paul’s
monk looked like a ballet dancer as he dodged them. Well, goody for him. By comparison, the Byzantine Thief looked like a monkey doing a jig as I dodged enough to stay alive. I kept my eyes on the floors and walls, watching for the trapdoor to open.

The hall shook again as the treasure room door started to slide shut. Paul must have seen it too, because the next thing I knew he dove for the opening and wedged his hands between the wall and the door. The monk strained to hold the slab open.

Ha, good luck with that.

“Byzantine, what the hell did you do?” Carpe yelled.

“Sprung the ancient Mayan booby trap—” Out of the corner of my eye I caught the tiled floor start to drop away, one by one, the scraping of the slab drowning out any noise the tiles made as they fell. I swung the screen camera around; Paul was still concentrating on the slab. I couldn’t tell whether he noticed the opening or not.

Now or never, while I had a head start. “And do me a favor? Kill Paul,” I said.

I held my breath as Byzantine jumped. My view of the torchlit tunnel faded as I hit a steep ramp and slid into darkness. The screen shook as I slid to the edge of the ramp and somersaulted over the lip. I scrambled to grab onto something, and I held, for a second, suspended over a cavern, the light from the torches flickering above like dim beacons. I hit the Up arrow as fast as I could and watched the Thief start to pull herself up. If she could just hold on a few seconds more, just enough to get her back on the ledge, I could ride it out until Carpe arrived.

The Byzantine Thief wrapped her arm around the ledge. I breathed a sigh of relief and started to maneuver her up slowly to conserve her strength.

She slipped.

“No!” I yelled, not quite believing what I was seeing.

“Byz? Don’t do anything stupid, I’m almost there—” Carpe said.

The screen jolted one last time before fading to black. I pulled my
headset off, not bothering to untangle my hair first, and threw it on the floor. “Son of a bitch.”

Captain unraveled from his perch on the windowsill to see what the commotion was about. Only two things in World Quest make the screen go black; when you’re knocked unconscious, and when you die.

I picked up my mouse and threw it at the wall; Captain yawned and curled right back up. “Shit.” Best-case scenario, I was unconscious. Not much help if something came along and decided to eat me. Death by rat pack, anyone?

Five minutes later a message popped up on my out-of-game screen.
Byz? What the hell happened?
Carpe wrote.
And where are you?