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A Gamer's Guide 275
🕑 Added 2024-07-13 17:20:29 +0000 UTCIn a terrified, panicking haze, Jarne searched the entire house, from top to bottom. He found hidden silverware, wedding jewelry, clothes, fabrics, things worth stealing, things worth eating, things worth burning, all in their proper places, untouched, unbothered. But no bodies. Only the black, dried puddles of molten viscera remained, in the very center of the living room, right where the bodies had been. Where they weren’t anymore.
He left the house. His face flashed left to right, his wide eyes searching desperately for that familiar blue cross—finding it just down the street. He darted for it.
The lock had been sliced off, as though by a laser. The door stood ajar. Nothing was touched. All valuables remained, pristine, spotless.
But the bodies were gone.
He could find the spots they had been in—vaguely humanoid silhouettes blobbed onto the floor like asymmetrical Rorschach tests—but the bodies themselves were gone.
He stumbled out of the house, his head as heavy as a bowling ball, the world around him appearing more unreal than ever. No longer in control of his own body, his legs pulled him down the street, staggering from house to house, checking each of the dead houses, finding nothing but a rehash of the houses that came before. Missing bodies and sliced open locks.
At some point—he couldn’t tell how long he’d been stumbling around—he found himself at the hospital. With no conscious decision to do so, he entered. Each room he passed by was filled with goblins. Some were lying in improvised, uncomfortable-looking cots, others on the floor, and a few were fortunate enough to have beds. In the first room, Jarne counted four dead, of the two dozen or so inhabitants. Nobody was talking. They were just breathing, with great difficulty. Most had one or more limbs amputated.
Jarne left and continued down the hallway. Nurses and doctors clad in leather hazmat suits passed by every now and again. Not many left, now. He looked down at his own outfit. Nothing protective. Maybe he should have…
“Rat?” a familiar voice said, but when Jarne turned to look at them, he couldn’t tell who it was due to the hazmat suit. But the voice clued him in. “Rat, you can’t be here without a hazmat suit, you really need to—”
“Jazz?” he said, his voice hoarse. Talking hurt. “Can we talk for a moment?”
From behind the hazmat suit’s goggles, he couldn’t see her expression. But he could hear her click her tongue. “I’m sorry, this is really not a good time. We’ve got our hands full, and Kitty will be here in a few minutes to do the daily donation round, so I really can’t—”
He took one step forward, then another, and collapsed into her arms. “Rat? Rat! Wait, please, are you…”
His eyes fluttered shut. Everything went dark. Finally, he could rest.
Though not for long.
“...No, it’s not dragon plague. Not drake pox, either. I think he was just tired. Dunno why though,” an annoying, grating voice said.
“Oh, oh, thank God, I don’t know if… I’m not sure we could handle losing another, I’m so… Thank you, Kitty, you came at the right time.”
“Yeah, no problem. Now, can we please go do the donation rounds? Moleman has a lot of work to do today, and the trial for the raiders is this afternoon, so…”
Jarne painstakingly blinked his eyes open, trying but failing to suppress a groan. “Ugh…”
“You’re awake! Oh, thank God, you’re okay, that was… Rat, you really scared me!” He stared up at her. He was on a bed. What a luxury. He hadn’t slept in one of those for… Close to five days now. “This is no time to be smiling! What did you…” Jazz’ eyes widened in recollection. “Oh! Sorry, I’m…” she turned to Kitty. “Sorry, could you do the donation round on your own? I’ve sent you a list of the patients, so if you could please…” The confused, mildly dubious look on Kitty’s face urged her to explain herself. Her smile turned thin. “Rat wanted to talk to me. In private. So, if you would please…?”
“Oh,” Kitty said. “Oh, like that. Got it. I’ll be…” He shot a suspicious look at Jarne. “I do hope this isn’t about Moleman. If you talk mean about him, I won’t be happy, you know?
She looked meaningfully at him. He, mercifully enough for Jarne’s eyes and ears, backed off. “Got it. I’ll go. Sorry. But, um… don’t wait too long, okay? Okay.”
Jazz watched him leave, and once he had closed the door behind him, she gave a sigh of relief. “What a guy. I don’t get what Mole sees in him.”
‘Utility,’ Jarne thought. But he’d never say it. “No clue,” he said instead, trying to sit up.
“Wait, wait,” she said, and before he could fathom what she was asking him to wait for, she’d shoved a glass of water in his hand. “Here. Drink. I can’t be sure, but I think you might have gotten a heat stroke.”
“Heat stroke? In March?”
“You’re Belgian,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Just because it rains ninety per cent of the year doesn’t mean it isn’t hot,” Jarne shot back, weakly. “Not that you can say anything.” He smirked, thinking of a perfect comeback. “Isn’t Estonia supposed to be an honorary Scandinavian country?”
She pursed her lips. “I’m… not sure about that one.” Still, the suggestion was able to rouse a chuckle from her. “Maybe. I don’t know. But… That’s not what you came to discuss, right?”
Sitting up straighter, he took a sip of water. That hit the spot. He gulped down a few more mouthfuls before speaking, wiping his mouth as he did. “Yeah. Yeah, that isn’t…” He frowned. There was so much he wanted to say. So many thoughts, crawling around like ants in his mind. “Something feels weird.”
She smiled without any real mirth. “Mind being more specific?”
“With Kitty. And…” He paused, feeling his determination waver. But in the corner of his vision, he could see her eyes, clear and earnest. He could trust her. “And… with Mole.”
Her expression fell, but there was no surprise on her face. If nothing else, she almost appeared resigned. “Yeah, I… I get what you’re saying.”
“That is… Kitty’s the same wackjob as always, but now Mole is somehow just as weird. He seriously intends on executing a bunch of people, and he seems to think that it’s all a-okay because some of them have agreed to donate. Meaning that, minus one, plus one… It evens out. And I know, I’ve never cared too much about the death penalty—I think it’s necessary sometimes—but Mole… You remember how stressed he was during the tutorial tournament, right? I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep for like, two of those nights, all because he was sitting up, writing notes for the trial. Kitty’s trial.”
“Maybe he didn’t actually mind the death penalty,” Jazz suggested, purely rhetorically, “but he simply didn’t want to see his friend killed?”
“No. That isn’t it. I get what you’re saying, but if we assumed that, then we would also have to assume that Mole would be the kind of person who’d lie to the courts to get what he wanted. That he’d make an exception for someone like Kitty simply because… some reason. I don’t know. Maybe because having someone who could kill entire cities and remain totally devoted to you is useful for the future? Who knows. But…”
“But,” Jazz continued for him, “if we assumed all that, then we would be assuming Mole wasn’t the person we thought him to be. We’d be assuming him to be some ruthless liar, someone who’d bring utilitarian thinking to its logical extremes. A manipulative monster.”
“Which he isn’t,” Jarne said. “We both know that.” He felt a smile rise to his lips. “Heh, remember when we first met Mole? We’d partied up, and were pulling ahead of everyone else, and then all of a sudden he just showed up on the floor, panting and asking us if we were part of the DC?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, and we hadn’t been keeping track of any of the boring forum stuff, so I thought he was talking about the American capital thing, and you thought he meant, like, DC comics, so you said you were more of a Marvel guy.”
“Yeah. And then…” His smile mellowed out a little. “That night, he broke down. You remember that? I hadn’t expected it. Sure, he looked young, but I didn’t think he was still a teenager.”
“I remember him talking about his brother, and all that. It was really surprising. Talk about being dealt a bad lot in life. I really…” She took a trembling breath. “I had really hoped, when we first met him, that he’d be able to beat the tutorial. Maybe he could even be the first.”
“I felt the same. But, now…” He turned away from her. “Something is happening. I don’t know what. Kitty is doing something, I’m sure of it, and I think he might have had a hand in what happened to Plus. But I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
She fell silent. For a long time, she simply sat there, her eyes downcast. “I… I think…” She gritted her teeth, turned toward the door, looked out the window, and then back to Jarne. There was something frightening in her eyes, something suspicious and scared and very, very sad. “I think Mole might be behind the dragon plague.”
Jarne stiffened. Suppressing his anger at such an accusation, suppressing everything he wanted to shout at her, he turned to her, slowly, carefully, sitting up straighter as he did.
“Why do you say that?”
She hunched down and stuck the nail of her thumb between her teeth, gnawing before she could say anything else. Her eyes turned back towards the door, as though she was afraid someone might be listening. “I can’t tell you for sure. I’m not even certain it’s Mole, but…”
“Out with it!”
Her back went up, and now she was sitting ramrod straight, her forehead slick with sweat and her freckled nose twitching. “Sully. Before—before she died, she sent me a few messages. She sent it to everyone, of course. Nothing bad. Nothing i—incriminating, but… She mentioned something weird. Because, see… Despite being sick… Despite dying from it…” Jazz gulped. “She never received a single resistance from it. Not even a level up. Not for virus, not for bacteria, not for parasite…”
“That doesn’t mean—” Exasperated, Jarne shook his head. “That doesn’t have to mean anything! She had high resistances. We both know that. I’m sure if you fell sick you’d receive a ton of level ups.”
She bit her lip. “No. No, I don’t think I would.”
“...And why is that?”
Her eyes burned with clarity. Horrible, dark clarity. “My divinity protection is too high.”
“Your…?”
“That was the one thing,” Jazz continued, “that rose. Only by two levels, but her divinity resistance did rise.”
Jarne shook his head again. “What the hell are you…?”
“It’s not a disease,” she said. “It’s a spell.”
Comments
Nogardnoir
Oh shit.
