World of Eternia: The Complete Collection (2 page)

“That makes the two
of us,” Wesley smiles broadly at the big man, who stands a good
three inches taller than Wesley’s six foot height. “Our strategy
against the chimera hinged on your ability to out muscle the beast,
and keep it grounded. Otherwise, it could have taken an hour to bring
the beast down with Magic Missiles whenever Lucious runs out of
water-based offensive spells. Diana's slingshot would not have
reached the chimera in the air; even if the stones reach it, they
won't penetrate the monster's thick hide. You and I are melee
fighters; we may as well be waving sticks at it and wait for our turn
to be roasted alive by the dragon's fire breath,” the strategist
outlined the possible outcome if their hold-and-fire strategy had
failed.

“I could have tried a
Meteor Shower spell on it,” Lucious thinks aloud, refusing to
concede across the board on the tactics that could have taken out the
just vanquished beast. “Even a high level monster like a chimera
would have been pounded into the ground.”

“You would have taken
our
melee
fighters
out along with the beast,” Diana
snorts in reply. “Remember, I have enough magical energy to cast
only one resurrection, not two, during this mission,” she reminds
him while waving her index finger in a tut-tut manner. “If you end
up dying, I’m not sure I would bother to resurrect you during this
mission,” she teases him with a grin.

“If you're so
useless, remind me again why you're in our party?” Lucious quips
rudely.

Diana puts her hands on
her hips. “Because you boys need a genteel woman to curb your
barbaric mannerism,” she huffs with indignation.

Conrad looks away,
politely pretending not to hear the comment. Although his player
character is in the barbarian class, he knows that her remark is not
directed at his choice of character class.

“A genteel woman?”
the mage replies mockingly with eyes wide open. Lucious curls his
fingers together in the shape of binoculars over his eyes. “Where?”
He pretends to look about in search of one.

Conrad shakes his head
at the mindless banter between the two spell casters. He walks over
to a big, smooth stone, where he had left his massive, ivory club
leaning upright on the ground. Made of a mammoth's tusk, the club is
his most prized possession. He had left the weapon aside because he
didn't want to risk his enchanted club getting damaged by dragon
fire. A true brawler's weapon, the club doubles the damage inflicted
on a humanoid-shape creature – regardless of size. In other words,
as long as the enemy has two arms, two legs, one head, and stands
upright, his club will inflict extra damage; also, that damage
calculation factors in his penetration bonus for his massive strength
attribute. One swing with his club is enough to take most mobs down.
“Quit squabbling, kids. The important thing is that we got pass the
chimera in one piece,” Conrad says as he takes a swing with his
club like a baseball bat. His stance and swing is perfected by the
tens of thousands of hours of practice in the batter's cage as a
baseball player.

Wesley smiles wryly at
Conrad. He is the glue that keeps this party together, the cavalier
notes. What an interesting group they make: a retired soldier, a
minor league professional baseball player, a young Wall Street
trader, and a graduate school student. The online game server
randomly tossed the group of four strangers together when they
started playing World of Eternia (“WoE”) shortly after the game's
release. In just one year, “The Strangers” have become one of the
best teams in the game, known for their unorthodox approach to
fighting monsters, and bending the rules of magic in rather creative
and innovative ways.

True to her tendencies
as a researcher, Diana frequently visits the player's forum boards,
and even submitted several Wikipedia entries on the characteristics
of the monsters they have defeated. Her postings online have kept The
Strangers in the public eye time and time again, particularly their
exploits as the team clears out zones and dungeons ahead of most
other player groups. In addition, Diana has posted walkthroughs for
certain difficult, high level missions, and she often receives
unsolicited requests on the boards for walkthroughs. Her frequent
interactions with the public at large have made her the de facto
public spokesperson for the group.

No doubt their style of
play and public visibility were among the reasons why the team was
among a select few invited by the game developers, Eternia
Development & Entertainment, Inc. (“EDE”), to participate in
an especially designed campaign to mark the first anniversary of the
WoE's release online. However, participants were required to agree to
a release, sent to their listed email addresses, allowing the company
to capture and stream real-time in-game video and audio footage of
player characters as they navigate through the special mission. The
campaign will be open to the general public once the mission has been
successfully completed by an invited team. The developers also hinted
at a unique prize awaiting the first team to finish this campaign. Of
course, EDE is celebrating the anniversary with other special in-game
items and mini-quests, so that no one is left out of the anniversary
celebration.

“Do you think we're
ahead of everyone else?” asks Diana, the graduate student pursuing
a master degree in psychology.

“I don't see why not,
with the way we have been blowing through the encounters so far,”
speculates Lucious, the sharp tongued, young Wall Street trader. His
motto as a player is “no resistance.” He has been loading up on
his player intelligence attribute to increase his odds of success in
casting spells where magic resistance comes into play. His high
intelligence also grants extra bonus in his mana pool. His favorite
tactic is to cast the Polymorph spell to turn monsters into frogs,
despite the spell's relatively low odds of success.

“Let's keep moving,”
Wesley the ex-Marine says, and starts walking.

The rest of the party
follows their de facto leader.

“Welcome to Eternia
Castle,” Lucious says quietly as the party takes in the scenery
before the team.

The castle lies in a
desolated area, surrounded by rotted and dying trees. Fortunately,
the virtual reality game has not advanced enough to affect a player's
sense of smell, or else the party will be gagging on the nauseating
stench of rot from the trees. The castle has long fallen into a state
of disrepair, with major cracks running along the lengths of the
massive stone walls. The castle is situated on top of a moat
surrounded by murky, foul looking water. An occasional splash hints
at the presence of something lurking inside the water.

“How are we getting
across?” Diana asks while staring at the blackish water. She does
not relish the idea of walking or swimming across, and ruin her white
robes. “You can fly us across, right Lucious?” she suggests while
batting her long eyelashes at the mage hopefully.

The battle mage rolls
his eyes at her attempt to butter him up. “I can't fly all four of
us across,” he shakes his head, after checking his mana pool and
quickly calculating how much mana is required to fly every member
over the moat.

“How about just one
person at a time?” Diana persists. She absolutely won’t swim
through these treacherous water!

“Nope,” he
declines, and holds up a hand to forestall her reply. “The flight
spell drains my mana pool on a per second basis. This is why we don't
have aerial combat among player characters in this game.
Theoretically, you could fly; but once you run out of mana, your
character will drop from the sky. However, if you have a Druid class
character, you could change shape into an avian creature and fly for
as long as you want. Air mages, or spell casters specializing in air
magic, are able to cast flight spells at half the cost. But they
still have a limit on their flight time. I'm not an air mage, and I
can't maintain the spell long enough to take the four of us over the
water,” the mage explains.

“That's just great,”
Diana sulks as her hope of avoiding a swim in the foul water is
deflated. “Are we going to swim across, then? I can't imagine how
much damage the contaminated water would do to our health points
while we swim across. We could even get poison status from the
water,” she blanches at the prospect of ruining her clothes,
especially her boots.

“We could try cutting
down some trees to build a bridge,” Conrad suggests as he eyes the
trees in the vicinity.

Wesley walks over to a
tree and grabs hold of a branch in his right gauntlet. With a sharp
twist, he snaps off the branch. “Possible, if the trees aren't
rotted to the core,” Wesley notes while holding up the branch to
show the empty space at the core of the wood to his party. “I don't
know if a makeshift bridge from these trees will hold up while we
cross it.”

“What if we go across
one person at a time?” Conrad proposes.

Wesley looks at the
barbarian with a doubtful expression on the knight’s face. “I
suppose it's possible that Diana could make it across, since she's
the lightest person in our party,” he says while eying her from
head to toe. “She's not wearing heavy armor either,” he notes.
“But you and I may have to swim across. I don't know if I will make
it with my suit of steel plate armor,” he says while looking down
at his attire. The knight is wearing a full suit of armor, missing
the helmet which Wesley loathes to wear, a large shield that is flat
at the top and curved at the bottom strapped to his left arm, and a
long sword in a simple black scabbard at his waist.

Lucious walks over to
stand in front of Wesley, and holds out his hand. “Can I borrow
that branch for a moment?” he asks.

“Sure. Be my guest,”
Wesley answers pleasantly but with surprise as he hands the long tree
branch over to his companion.
I
wonder what he has in mind.

The rest of the group
watches the mage walk to the edge of the foul water, bends down, and
jabs the branch straight into the water. The end of the branch is a
fraction of an inch above the water.

“The water is not
that deep,” Lucious announces without looking back at the party.
“It looks to be around waist deep,” he adds. “We could walk
through it.”

“I'm still not
walking through the water,” Diana replies with a frown. “Gods of
Eternia know what's swimming in it.”

Lucious looks at Diana
and rolls his eyes again. “My dear, delicate priestess, I am
calculating how much earth needs to be moved in order to create a
bridge just above the foul water,” he reveals with exasperation.

The other party members
perk up their ears at the phrase, “to create a bridge.”

“You can do that?”
Conrad looks at the mage in befuddlement. He has seen the battle mage
cast fireballs and lightning bolts often, but nothing earth related.
Heck, he doubts Lucious knows any earth based spells that could help
them get across the moat.

“Earth magic has a
spell called 'Move Earth,'” Lucious replies with a nod and a grin;
he knows exactly what Conrad is thinking. It is true that the battle
mage has not used any fancy earth spells lately. But this reflects
the lack of opportunity, rather than the battle mage’s inability to
do so.
Time to correct this
misconception
, he thinks. “I am not an Earth mage, but
occasionally I find it useful to change the terrain in an
environment. I was trying to calculate the length of a bridge that I
could create with the Move Earth spell,” he explains.
I
should add a disclaimer just in case I can’t make the bridge
connect to the land on the other side of the moat,
Lucious
reminds himself. “I am that confident that I have enough mana to
create a bridge that will cross most of the moat. We might have to
jump across the end of the bridge, though, to get back on land,” he
warns.

“So what's the hold
up?” the barbarian asks with an askew eyebrow. He hates how the
mage likes to exaggerate the difficulty of accomplishing this.
If
Lucious can’t pull this off, he wouldn’t have bothered to mention
it in the first place.

“With one notable
exception, the party members wear no armor, and therefore would have
no problem jumping across,” the battle mage replies while staring
at the cavalier's heavy steel plate armor.

Wesley finds himself
under intense scrutiny from the rest of the party. “I could take
off my armor before I jump across,” he suggests.

“But that would take
forever,” Diana groans. “And we are in a race to finish this
mission first, remember?” she reminds him. “We already wasted too
much time just standing here gawking at the moat,” she complains.

“I could toss you
across,” Conrad suggest while flexing his humongous biceps.
Gotta
show off my build to my adoring fans
, he thinks while
taking a furtive glance at the overhead cameras capturing in-game
video.

“What about damage
from impact?” the cavalier replies while visualizing the toss in
his mind.

“I'll patch you right
back up. Now stop being a baby!” Diana flicks her fingers in the
air to dismiss his complaint.
I
am not swimming across
, she determines.
If
I have to waste some healing prayers on Wesley to avoid the water,
I’ll do it!

Wesley looks at the
barbarian and the mage, and sees that they both agree with her.
Seeing no room to argue the matter, the former soldier finally waves
the white flag. “Fine,” he exhales loudly in surrender.

“Very good, oh
fearless leader,” the mage jumps in before Wesley changes his mind
and backs out. “Now please be quiet. I need to concentrate while I
cast this complex spell,” Lucious replies. He kneels on the ground,
and places his palms flat on the ground. He leans forward until his
head touches the ground as well. He closes his player character's
eyes to increase his concentration, and starts chanting the arcane
language of the powerful spell:
“heth-voke-putu-masu-move-heth-voke-putu-masu-taal!”