Fragments (Somnia Online Book 3), page 23
She sat up and glanced at her bathroom, desperately wanting to feel hot water cascade down on her. Even if it wasn’t real, at least it would feel it, right?
As the water rushed down on her, she reveled in the normalcy of taking a shower, of giving into the heated water, of feeling like she was at least partially alive. While it was a simulation, her mother had somehow made it utterly convincing. If she didn’t know that it was the wrong reality, she wouldn’t have thought twice. Just like she hadn’t before she knew.
Toweling off after washing her hair, she pulled on her favorite pair of PJs. Soft and gentle against her skin, it gave her a feeling of home that she missed. She curled up in bed, on her side, with her headset on the nightstand, and pulled the covers up to her neck.
For a few moments of snuggling into her blankets she allowed herself to pretend it was real, to pretend she’d escaped whatever it was this headset had done to attach itself to her brain. Those few seconds were glorious.
Then she took a deep breath. Fine. So maybe it wasn’t mind over matter, but for a while there, she’d done something. Logging out had never felt that conflicting. She’d never been left barely able to move or open her eyes, like her body and brain were fighting.
That meant there was something to what she’d done. Now she just needed to figure out what it was. But first she needed some shut-eye. She closed her eyes and let herself drift off, her mind for once utterly exhausted.
Feeling refreshed as she logged back into Curet, Murmur placed a hand on Snowy’s head and looked out over the city’s lily-pad center. She knew her friends would be logging in soon, and she had a few things she needed to do before that.
Namely, she had to check out the new armor she’d received. Sinister was going to love the way the lengthened tunic flared out in pieces for ease of movement. The deep purple only made the lights beneath her skin glow brighter when she cast spells. Its stats were a good improvement, but she was willing to bet there wouldn’t be much of an upgrade for a while.
CON +10
STR +10
AGI +10
WIS +10
INT +40
CHA +50
HP +75
MANA +150
MA +60
She frowned at the total addition her own buffs made to her skills. With her necklace and circlet and ring—not to mention the staff—and it was plus eight to every stat, which...she started. The staff had leveled up. While she remembered some talk of it leveling up with her for a while, Murmur hadn’t realized exactly what that meant. When had it done that? She frowned, not remembering an adjustment before she’d put her new armor on.
There, right at the bottom of the information about her armor set, it told her that it enhanced mana-infused crafted weapons as well. At least there was the explanation for the four-point increase to every stat the staff originally gave. Still, it seemed rather convenient, and she eyed the dragons on top of her staff skeptically, as if they’d come clean about however the system decided it was going to work. They remained, expectedly, silent.
CON 22 (44)
STR 10 (32)
AGI 20 (74)
WIS 12 (66)
INT 62 (126)
CHA 83 (157)
HP 606 (731)
MANA 858 (1028)
MA 160 (255)
Even without anyone else’s buffs, she’d grown. She refused to listen to the voice in the back of her head telling her that everyone else, including the mobs they had to fight, had grown as well and just let herself bask in the bit of strength she’d gained. But after a few minutes, she sat up straight and decided to figure out her new MA abilities properly.
That reinforcement of her basic skills made sense, in an eerie way. She didn’t even want to think what might have happened if she’d attempted to use more of her kinetic skills during their last battle. The headache backlash from shielding had been bad enough.
A sudden growl in Snowy’s throat reverberated through to her hand and made Murmur whirl around quickly. In front of her stood a tall Feles, with Siamese markings and colorings. She was at eye level with Murmur and utterly gorgeous. Her fur was sleek, and her face spread into one of those lazy cat grins as she glanced at Snowy, whose growling subsided immediately.
“Murmur. I’ve not seen you for a while.”
“We’ve met?” Murmur thought she would have recalled a feles this pretty.
“I’m Emilarth, and looked a lot different last time I saw you.” Their laugh was melodic, echoing around through the trees.
Murmur wracked her brain to try and remember where she’d met this feles, except... “Oh, wow. You were the locus that gave me the undead ring.”
Emilarth inclined her head, and frowned. “You’re still wearing that? You really need to upgrade your jewelry. Anyway, I wanted you to know that the enchanter master here has been restored to her rightful place, and that you will now be able to study here without fear of misdirection.”
“Thank you.” Murmur wasn’t sure what else to say but didn’t want her to leave yet. “What happened?”
“A greedy enchanter decided to take something for themselves instead of working hard toward it.” Emilarth smiled with a type of graciousness she seemed to think would appease Murmur.
“Look. That wasn’t just some random scripting incident gone wrong. That was totally off anything that was supposed to happen. I’m not sure if you’re a GM or another damned AI, but this one was dangerous.” Murmur didn’t like that she could feel a tremor spreading through her body or that she was genuinely upset at the world for throwing this wrench into the works.
Most of all, Murmur didn’t want platitudes that things would be okay. She needed guarantees. With the way her kinetic magic seemed to react with the world, she wouldn’t feel safe using it deliberately until she knew no one was out to get her group. No one outside of Jirald that is. She’d not heard a peep from them since they’d trounced Exodus in the gnoll caves, and the building tension of waiting for him to stab her in the back again wasn’t doing her disposition any favors.
Emilarth raised a delicate eye ridge, studying Murmur with catlike precision. “We know. You know. Don’t scare others needlessly. It’s under control for now. Just remember that nothing will rectify it quicker than playing the forced storyline through to its end.”
Murmur blinked, her seemingly irrational fear fading instantly at the calmness in the feles’s words. “So, you’re saying we need to play her game and defeat her to cast the evil out forever?”
“Something like that.” Emilarth chuckled and spoke words that left no more doubt in Murmur’s mind. “I can see why Telvar finds you so fascinating.”
In a blink of the eye, Emilarth was gone.
Snowy wuffed at the air where she’d been, and looked back beseechingly at Murmur as if asking her what the fuck.
“Right there with you boy, right there with you.” Murmur gave him an absent-minded pet behind the ears wishing Emilarth had stayed longer, answered more questions, and not been so enigmatic. In an effort to distract herself, she turned toward the fountain. The balancing feles were intriguing. If she’d done her mental calculations properly, and the ruins were in fact a part of the key quests, then this fountain, and perhaps the fountain in Cognitia might even have something to do with it. Thing was, she had no idea in which way.
Sighing, she sat down on the edge of it while waiting for her friends to log in, closed her eyes and crossed her long legs. She reached out with her sensor net and attempted to activate her passive kinetic ability. The blinding headache as she triggered it was definitely not something she’d been expecting.
Backing off, she blinked her eyes open, trying to chase the black spots away from her vision. Snowy nudged her knee with his cold nose, concern in his intelligent eyes as he focused on her.
“It’s okay. May have overdone the intensity there.” She mumbled at him as she readied herself again. No use in giving up, the others weren’t here, and the abilities weren’t active ones, so sitting in peace and quiet should help her.
Not that it was all that quiet. Feles children may have been light on their feet, but their games weren’t. Their laughter echoed through the canopy like tiny bells ringing. In a way, the melodic strains of their play helped soothe Murmur in a manner she hadn’t realized she needed.
She watched them run back and forth playing tag, hide and seek, and something she didn’t understand that involved a bouncy ball with a mind of its own. Watching them had a hypnotic effect on her, calmed her mind, and let the Basic Kinetic Structure flow through to her sensor and shield.
Her eyes opened wide as she realized she could feel the actual mental shields surrounding everyone within her range. Barriers that were no longer such for her, but instead doors she could open easily, because they weren’t walls, but innate defenses that the mind gave itself. Unlike her own protections that she’d mortared together with her thoughts and sheer will, these were reflexive barriers the mind had built to protect itself from mental attacks.
She knew it, she could identify it, and she could reach out with a thought and touch those same shields, bounce on them, feel their tangibility. If she punched just a little harder...
And then she realized she’d even bolstered her Thought Projection. What was punching through a shield if it wasn’t an almost physical manifestation of Thought Projection? Excitement began to build up in her. She could reach through and affect people’s thoughts whether they were shielded or not, whether they wanted her to or not. Punching through to directly affect them, deliberately affect them—that had a multitude of possibilities.
For stubborn enemies, for great enemies, and if Jirald kept up this fucking quest to kill her for those damned shards, for stubborn, misogynistic enemies too. The only downside was that if she affected minds in here, did it transpose to the outside? Probably not, right? Or she wouldn’t be in a coma, because her whole mind over matter schtick should have worked.
After a couple of hours sitting there and honing her skills with their new-found bolster, Murmur tracked Sinister’s progress as her best friend logged in right until she sat down next to Mur, on the opposite side of Snowy, and just waited. Sinister seemed content to sit next to her and wait. Her friend’s mind was a melancholy mixture, its thoughts whirling just beneath a surface that was sturdier than others Murmur had faced. It made her wonder if the choice of enchanter as Sin’s hybrid class had helped inadvertently reinforce her own mental protections.
Technically, Mur now had the ability to dive in and sift through thoughts, whether the target wanted her to or not. While the back of her mind screamed at her that such a thing was wrong, the forefront was trying to logically calculate just how much of what she saw in-game would remain only in and from Somnia. Would she only have access to thoughts centered around Somnia, or would they extend to the much larger real world? How much effort would she have to put into being able to push gently past those shields?
So many questions, and that annoying moral part of her wouldn’t let her test anything out. At least not on her friends. Maybe her enemies, maybe some NPCs. That moral part also made her feel good though, because without it, she was only a step away from giving into the darkness that constantly tried to talk to her.
“Sleep well, Sin?” Murmur asked, remaining in her relaxed pose and not even opening her eyes.
Sin chuckled next to her. “Sleep at all, Mur?”
“Actually, I napped.” Back at home, in bed, is what Murmur didn’t answer. Sin had a way of only answering what she wanted to answer when she wanted to answer it. Sometimes it was endearing, other times it was fucking infuriating. “You’re a bit earlier than expected.”
She could sense a feeling of discomfort within Sin, but it didn’t appear to be directed at Murmur herself, but more at Somnia and reality not being one. Was that invasion of privacy? Murmur couldn’t be sure, but in her current half-trance, she could see so much without any effort, so it wasn’t like she’d pried.
“We don’t seem to spend much time together. I miss just us time. The others can be...” She paused as if trying to find the right word, the least offensive term.
“Rowdy?” Murmur offered with a small smile. Finally, she uncrossed her legs, opened her eyes and half-turned to Sin. “Yeah. I miss our time. We used to log on together all the time, remember? Make it in a little earlier so we could get shit done, so we could research, so we could plan our next course of adventure?”
Sin grinned. “So we could figure out who we were going to practical joke next. Those were the best of times.”
“For us, anyway.” Murmur sighed. She really did miss just having her friend by her side. Somnia felt so crowded, so teeming with life, even if a lot of it was supposed to be AI driven.
Sinister leaned in, resting her head on Murmur’s shoulder. The proximity and warmth her body lent the enchanter was remarkably solid and real. Calm suffused Mur, and she relaxed, not having realized she was so tense to begin with. Just having Sin there often helped her moods, and she’d hated arguing with her. The irritation she’d had melted away and she leaned into the half hug.
“Can we just stay like this for a bit, Mur?” Sin sounded uncharacteristically sad. The melancholy in her voice leaked through, concerning Mur so much she reached her hand around Sin’s shoulder and squeezed gently.
“We can stay like this forever.” And for several minutes they did.
She’d always taken for granted that Harlow would be there, that Sinister would play games with her. But what happened if Murmur died? What happened if Somnia crashed and burned after a while like so many games that gave way to the latest and greatest? What if she still wasn’t out of her coma by then?
The thoughts scared her; the situation was so unpredictable. So she leaned into Sin, drinking in that constant that had been there for as long as she could remember. She let it wind into her, and calm her fears, at least for now. They were working on it. Everyone was trying to figure it out. There was no way she’d let go of Sin, and no one could make her.
It took a while for everyone else to get back, so Murmur and Sin visited a couple of the stalls to make sure they had enough potions and supplies. With Snowy bringing up the rear, most of the feles kept their distance. Murmur smiled to herself—maybe there was something to that cat and dog thing.
“You know I can pull temporary healing potions from my cauldron now, right?” Mellow spoke softly from behind her and almost made her drop the healing potion she was holding.
“No, because none of you tell me what skills you get, and I’ve been having to wait until someone else gets them and mentions them in a forum somewhere online that I can access.” She glared at them, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Mellow laughed. “You have to make up your mind. Either you want us to share, or you want us to hoard every advantage that we have. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Pedantic. Just tell me. You don’t have to tell everyone.” Murmur placed the potion back onto the stall table and turned to Mellow. “So, what do they do, how do you do what you do, and what do I need to know?”
“I can concoct batches of five health potions at a time. No one can have more than five at a time. They heal up two hundred hit points, which isn’t huge, but it’s good in a pinch, and they have a four-hour lifespan.” Mellow’s eyes were distant, obviously immersed in their HUD to retrieve information. Murmur wondered just how many spells and concoctions Mellow had. Not even that, what about everyone else? Was she the only one with a massive spells and abilities list?
She realized Mellow was waiting for a response of some sort from her. “That’s amazing. We should probably make sure we all have a set of them before we go into the ruins.”
“Thought as much.” Mellow grinned and eyed the mana potions at the stall. “Can’t do mana until level forty though.”
Murmur sighed and shook her head. “They’re not very generous with their mana regeneration abilities, are they?”
“Gotta impose strictness somehow. Can’t make it too easy to win now, can they?” Sinister interjected, making Murmur jump.
Last she’d seen, Sin had been over at another stall picking out rare tailoring ingredients to help Neva’s ongoing quest to get the best stuff into the armory.
It was weird to think they had an armory now.
“You need to start announcing your presence,” Murmur mumbled grumpily, checking her sensor net for reasons it might not have alerted her to Sin’s presence.
“Nope. Not going to do that.” Sinister’s grin was infectious, and Murmur was grateful for having got over the awkwardness after their argument.
“So, are we ready, or did you all want to spend more time shopping?”
Murmur turned around to find Devlish standing behind them with everyone else in tow. “We thought shopping would be best. Next on the agenda: shoes.” She added a wink to the end of it which had the others laughing softly.
Snowy nudged her fingers, and she petted him obediently. It was like he’d trained her. And she didn’t entirely object to it either. She barely noticed the diminished MA, and it didn’t really impact her usage. Snowy contributed to her damage, and his evasion and defensive abilities made him an excellent companion. That, and he was cute.
“Well. Are we ready then?”
“I was waiting for you.” Beastial scratched his cat behind the ears, glaring mildly at Snowy while he did so. “Thought you were too busy talking.”
Sinister rolled her eyes. “Sure you did. We believe you think all the time.” And she patted his arm gently.
Murmur had to fight hard not to laugh at the expression on Beastial’s face. He excelled at walking into every single set up Sinister made for him. But they’d literally spent no time at all leveling in around fifteen real world hours, and Murmur was starting to get antsy. Not to mention the rogue enchanter running around out there who was just waiting for them to walk into her trap.
