The Warped Forest Page 10

  The salty noodle mix satisfied her hunger, but she kept feeling like it was missing something, so she dug through the cabinets until she found a bag of loose granola, which she dumped into it. The crunchy material seemed to be the piece she was missing.

  After eating, Alex searched the house again, looking for signs that someone was out of the game, opening doors that she'd avoided before. In one room, she found the walls had been written on, extensive calculations for a type of mathematics she'd never encountered before. She could pick out derivatives and other signs of calculus, but there were symbols completely foreign to her in the mix.

  When it didn't seem like anyone was around, she went back to her room and looked through the spell book that she'd found on her previous visit. In the vellum pages, she found neat handwriting describing complex spells along with professional looking sketches for the finger movements. Unfortunately, the spell effects weren't given and she was such a novice with magic that they could have been for summoning demons or creating a nice Cobb salad.

  Alex studied the book until the hazy light of morning kissed the glass, revealing that the storm had passed. She raced to the rotary phone and dialed her mother, hoping to catch her before she took her morning walk.

  The phone rang eight times, Alex's heart sinking lower at each one, but then someone answered.

  "Duke residence," said her mother.

  "Hey, Mom!"

  "Alexandria!" came the excited reply, followed by a throat-rattling cough.

  "You okay, Mom?" she asked.

  "Nothing really." A pause. "I thought you were going to call more."

  Heat rose to Alex's face. "I'm sorry, I planned to, but when I'm in the game, I can't."

  "Game?" asked her mom. "I thought you were learning magic?"

  "I am, but it's complicated," she said, realizing she didn't want to explain.

  "I've been wondering if you were even at that Hundred Halls place," said her mom, clearly exasperated.

  "Yeah, Mom. I know, I should have called sooner," said Alex, putting her hand to her forehead. "Uhm, weird question, and please humor me by answering, but what day is it?"

  "Tuesday," said her mom with a questioning tone.

  "No, like what day, the date," said Alex.

  "It's November fifteenth."

  Alex held her hand over the mouthpiece. "Oh shit."

  She thought it'd been half that time, but she must have gotten the ratio between the two wrong. Not that it was easy to mentally calculate time. She could juggle numbers in her head, and directions were relatively intuitive to her, but time, especially when playing games, always ran away from her. She didn't even want to think about the fact that she was only level 3 and she had seventeen more to go. At her current pace, she’d fall short at level 12.

  Alex paced along the hallway, tethered to the phone by the curly wire. Back at home, she'd never found it difficult to talk to her mom, but the distance made her fumble over her words.

  "Hey, uhm, how are you doing?"

  "You already asked that, sweetie," said her mom.

  "What about the diner?"

  A barely contained sigh came through the phone. "I haven't been there in a few weeks. I fell and twisted my wrist, and now I can't even knit."

  "Mom! I asked how you were," said Alex, exasperated.

  "I didn't want to worry you, but you asked."

  Alex pulled the phone away from her ear and shook her head.

  "Why did you fall?" she asked.

  "I got dizzy."

  "Is this is a one-time thing? Or has it happened before?" said Alex.

  "A few times, but that was the worst," said her mom.

  She almost asked if she'd been to the hospital but she knew that answer. There was no way they could afford the medical care, not for a sprained wrist and especially not for unspecified dizzy spells.

  As much as her heart clenched with terrible ideas of what it might be, it was more likely that she'd been working herself up about minor things, or just plain loneliness.

  "Has Frank been able to help out?" she asked.

  "He's been a big help, Alexandria. Don't worry about me. I'm a grown woman. I can take care of myself," said her mom.

  Standing on the other end of the phone halfway across the country, Alex couldn't quite pinpoint the time when the roles with her mother had switched, but the comment made her all too aware that it had happened.

  "Have you been enjoying school?" asked her mom.

  Alex hesitated before answering. "Yeah. It's been hard, much harder than I thought, but I'm learning things."

  Not sure if I'm learning anything useful, but I'm learning things about the game.

  "That's good," said her mother.

  "Are you going to be okay on bills? You can sell my gaming gear if you want," said Alex.

  "I wouldn't even know where to take it," said her mom. "But I appreciate the sentiment."

  Silence filled in between them, for Alex because she was wishing she could be back home just long enough for a hug. Talking to her mom reminded her that she hadn't had human contact in months.

  "Alex, honey."

  "Yeah, Mom?"

  "It's time for my walk."

  Alex smiled. She knew how much a creature of habit her mom was about certain things.

  "Yeah, Mom, that's fine."

  "Are you going to call sooner?"

  Alex sighed. "I'll try, but schoolwork is going to keep me busy and away from a phone. Hell, even now I'm using an old-timey rotary phone."

  "Try harder, sweetie. I have to go."

  "Love you, Mom."

  "Love you, Alexandria."

  Before she hung up, she heard a new round of coughing on her mother's end.

  Afterwards, Alex went back to her room to crash. It might be daytime in the real world, but it was nighttime in Gamemakers Online. But sleeping on the bed proved difficult. She'd gotten used to her pile of furs in the cliffside cave. Alex tossed and turned for a few hours before deciding to log back in.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The first order of business upon her return was a new weapon. The rotting venom had deprived her of the Vicious Thorny Whip, which was what she’d been using to kill the high-level mobs after her minion bloats bled them sufficiently.

  She was adept at making large-scale traps involving nets and falling logs, but it was laborious work and wouldn't always finish the job. It didn't help that she lacked a knife, or access to metal.

  "Not even a single vendor to buy from, not that I have any money," she said.

  Her only access to other materials had been through Ethel, and she didn't have enough Worthless Baubles to trade and hadn't seen the Great Raven in quite some time.

  Sitting on the throne of her furs, Alex laid everything she owned onto the cave floor, in hopes she might get a moment of inspiration.

  1 Exquisite Cooking Pot

  1 Handysack

  17 Water

  23 Various Meats

  14 Worthless Baubles

  3 Rhinoboar Hide

  2 Giant Moth Wings

  1 Ethel's Adhesive Ointment

  1 Shiny Black Feather

  1 Acceleration Bar

  2 Electric-Python Skins

  3 Indigo

  7 Hemp Ropes

  2 Hemp Net

  1 Goat-Bull Tail

  The meager display left her crossing her arms and staring with a frown hooked on her lips.

  "What I wouldn't give for some metal, or even bone," she said.

  Alex thought about making an expedition to the Plains in search of materials, but Bucket and Martina had warned her away. She'd be more likely to die over there than gain anything useful. Not that she even knew how to get over the chasm. Climbing down using her ropes was one thing, getting up the other side was another.

  Her options seemed limited, but she didn't stop thinking about it. A lack of resources forced creativity. Alex decided to use the ropes much as she had against the cobrawasp when it'd gotten its stinger
stuck in the soft tree.

  Alex took her rope and tied it into a makeshift lasso. She knew a few basic knots but had never needed to learn more than that. Her father had trapped for fur and meat in the early years, but he’d used manufactured metal traps, not ones handcrafted from basic materials.

  When she had a workable version, Alex went up top to practice throwing it on a saproling. It only took a dozen attempts to realize that it would never work. She couldn't get the opening to go around a stationary object consistently, so how would she get it to loop over a dangerous creature's head while it was trying to kill her? Sure, after she tracked down and drained one, it would be easy to put the loop over its head, but not all of her fights were that planned out. She needed a weapon she could use when ambushed, and not just by the cobrawasp. The smaller critters of the Warped Forest were just as dangerous when she was unprepared.

  Alex tried making a whip out of a rope, but it was too flimsy. The tough vine had provided the perfect snap to the weapon, augmented by the thorns, which dealt the majority of the damage.

  Feeling like she had to get really creative, Alex added Ethel's ointment to a contraption of ropes and tree branches. To get the ropes into the proper shape, she hung them from a line tied between two trees. As she was applying the glue, she spilled a little, which stuck the rope to her forearm.

  "Oh crap, that's not good," she said, tugging on the rope, but her skin bulged away, indicating it was stuck fast.

  Secondary to her immediate problem was that the rope was tied to the line between the trees, which meant she'd leashed herself in place.

  Alex tried yanking on the rope to free it but nothing moved. Her minions, drawn by the struggle, took roost in the nearby trees.

  "Not my best work. But do I really need an audience?"

  Her minions stared back with wide eyes. Realizing they weren't going to be any help, Alex climbed the tree to free herself from the crossline. She could figure out how to unglue her arm later.

  But the tree had few handholds, which meant she had to hold onto the trunk with her thighs while she tried to untie the rope. Tired from the exertion, Alex slipped, and in trying to grab the support line, managed to get tangled up, falling headfirst towards the ground.

  She would have welcomed the accidental death, if only to escape from the contraption, but the ropes cinched around her feet and she stopped half a foot from impact.

  "Wonderful," she said, trying to do an upside down sit-up so she could reach the ropes around her ankles, but she couldn't reach.

  Alex let her body resume its hanging position, her arms resting against the ground.

  "Foiled by the inability to do crunches. Who knew gym class would ever be useful," said Alex.

  She was wracking her brain for ideas when Axo scurried up, sniffing and lifting up on its legs as if it couldn't figure out what was going on.

  "Tell me about it, Axo. I'm as perplexed as you are how I managed this," she told the little shrew. "Think you can crawl up there and chew me to freedom?"

  The shrew wriggled its whiskers before scurrying back the other way.

  "Hmmpf, a lot of help you are," said Alex, making another attempt at reaching the ropes around her legs.

  When she returned to the hanging position, she found Axo waiting for her. She was getting a little dizzy from the blood rushing to her head, so she didn't quite see what was in the shrew's tiny hands.

  "Whatcha got there?" she asked.

  But she didn't get to finish the sentence as halfway through, Axo leaned onto her face and shoved a dead spider directly into her mouth. The dead hairy spider lodged against her cheek, and it took five horrible seconds to spit it out.

  "Aughh, Axo," said Alex. "I need help not food!"

  The shrew tried to grab the spider and force it into her mouth again, as if it thought she'd mistakenly rejected it, but she twisted her head back and forth until Axo gave up.

  Dejected, the shrew took its offering and carried it to the log. The tiny hunched shoulders of the shrew told its sad tale, followed by a pathetic crunch as Axo decided to eat the spider itself.

  "I'm not sure why I'm feeling guilty about being force-fed a spider, but here I am."

  She glanced to her minions, who were patiently watching on their perch.

  "A lot of help you are," said Alex. "Next time, I'm going to make minions out of cats. They'd be way more helpful than you are right now."

  After a few more minutes of struggle, Alex decided to try fire magic to burn her way out. That way she wouldn’t have to do a full crunch, only halfway, and hope the flames would reach the ropes.

  It took a dozen tries, but when she finally caught the ropes on fire, they dealt eight points of damage before she was released from the tangle.

  Finally back on her feet, she said, "Oh thank god Ethel wasn't here to see that. I probably would have lost all reputation with her for that disaster." She paused. "Or gained rep, I guess."

  After burning the rope from her arm, Alex put the ointment back into her Handysack, before seeing what else she had that she could turn into a weapon. The other unique materials in her possession—the rhinoboar hides, giant moth wings, electric-python skins, and a goat-bull tail—were too precious to use unless she knew it was going to work. Her earlier work with the rhinoboar hide had proved fruitless, using up two of them without benefit.

  The goat-bull tail was enticing, but it was too stiff, barely bending when she applied pressure. The electric-python skins gave her static shocks every time she picked them up, but she didn't know how to wrap them around the rope to make it effective.

  Her breakthrough came when she was holding an electric-python skin around a hemp rope, applying faez randomly. A spark of lightning jumped from the skin, traveled into the rope, and was followed by a pop-up.

  You have learned a new spell: Transference

  "Whoa," said Alex, immediately grasping the implications.

  Spell: Transference – Tier One

  Faez: Varies ׀ Duration: Permanent

  Effect: Transfer magic from one item to another.

  The amount of faez required would be the limiting factor on what she could transfer, but the spell opened up a whole new window of possibilities.

  When she examined the electric-python skin, she noticed it'd changed.

  Item: Animal Skin

  She'd taken the electrification from the skin and applied it to the rope. But the hemp rope was still a mundane item, though it now had the "electrified" modifier on it. Anxious to make her weapon, but not wanting to rush into failure, Alex went back up top to find suitable items to practice on before she attempted to use the other skin she had.

  Alex made copies of the hemp rope, then tried to transfer things from a piece of wood and other items, but there was no magic to move, so she got a [Not Valid Target] message.

  Back in the cave, she pulled out one pair of giant moth wings and a brutal rhino hide. If she could transfer the flight ability into the hide, she could fight the cobrawasp in the air and make the journey to the Warsong Plains easily, plus receive some much needed experience for quest completions.

  Alex set the two items side by side, placing her hands on the flimsy gossamer wings. She took a deep breath and cast the Transference spell, concentrating on the rhinoboar hide.

  The magic grew in her mind, building behind her forehead, but instead of the spell completing, ghostly lines formed over the giant moth wings and the Brutal Rhinohide, almost like a circuit pattern. Sparks of light shot through the lines.

  Alex stared at the pattern, trying to understand what it was trying to tell her. The giant moth wings had many lines crossing over each other, in a strange configuration that reminded her of a Mobius strip crossed with an octopus. As she stared at it, the pressure built up, making her squint. She wanted to release the faez, but it appeared she wasn't finished casting the spell.

  "Come on," she muttered, "what do I need to do?"

  The Brutal Rhinoboar hide had a less complex pattern,
looking like the lines of a chessboard had been knocked askew. Aspects of it reminded her of a mathematical matrix, which had been a favorite of hers in Algebra. Except this matrix was jumbled up and set at cross purposes. The nodes where the lines crossed pulsed with greater impetus, as if they were urging her to act.

  Wanting to do something—anything—to release the faez from her mind, Alex ran her finger along the lines between the wings and hide as if she were drawing in midair, to help make the connection. When she finished the motion, the lines filled in with light.

  Her actions changed the way the faez felt in her mind, but it was still trapped. It felt like her head was in a vise. Alex kept connecting them until a pair of nodes lit up with a flash of light and the magic burst through her hands like a warm rush. The giant moth wings disintegrated into ash.

  You have gained a skill point: +1 Transference

  The relief was palpable. Alex pressed her fingers against her temples and massaged away the ache.

  "That was unpleasant."

  While she'd improved the spell by one point, the giant moth wings had been annihilated. She had one more pair, but decided she didn't want to use them yet because she didn't quite understand what the nodes and lines were trying to tell her. It appeared the Transference spell was significantly more complex than the others.

  She waited until her faez bar refilled then grabbed the rhinoboar hide. Even though she didn't understand it, the pattern seemed less difficult than the one on the giant moth wings. Maybe trying to use two items that had abilities was too difficult for her skill level. She hoped to apply the toughness from the hide to her Cloth Breeches, which had been hanging onto their last point of durability for quite some time.

  "Come on," she said, "work this time."

  Alex cast the Transference spell, being careful to make the gestures as crisply as possible. In real life, the tiny details of spellcasting mattered—one wrong gesture could turn disastrous—but she didn't know if Gamemakers Online was the same.