Portal Mage - A Viridian Gate Serial Adventure #4

Morsheim isn’t so bad, once you get used to it. I’m not saying I’d want to spend my vacations there, but it would be tolerable if I wasn’t dead.

As it was, I was being dragged and my face was scraping across the rocks. My nerves were dead too, by this point, so I wasn’t in any pain, but imagine hearing the sound of your skull smacking into the floor over and over, your vision blurry, and you can’t protect yourself. You can’t move at all. You can’t tell the Vogthar who’s got you by the leg to stop being lazy and pick you up.

And why would he? For most people, respawning is something they feel afterward but don’t remember. If your entire existence was sorting through the corpse piles because the scripts carved into your skin told you to, wouldn’t you drag your feet a little?

I was loaded into one of the corpse carts bound for Skalahólt. Top of the pile, this time, so I could look up at the distant ceiling through the green haze and see the massive crystal crabs tending to their upside-down gardens. Two hours on top of the pile instead of stuffed under layers of cold, leaking bodies was like a luxury cruise for the true connoisseur of deadness. Trust me, there may be no poop in V.G.O., but there are plenty of other things that can come out of a body once it’s been torn open.

I got the VIP treatment once we reached the city. Two Vogthar [Eloyte Knights] grabbed me by the shoulders, so it was only my knees and shins being scraped bloody across the cobbles. My head was flopped to the side, but I could kind of see the city out of the left corner of my eyes, and it hadn’t changed much since the war. There weren’t as many Vogs around—part of the deal the Lorekeepers struck with Grim Jack meant the majority of their people were sent back to the Material Realm, scripts erased and reborn as the Thar once more.

Some of them didn’t want that, so they stayed, along with the Darklings who just wanted to live a simple life without the conflict and angst of the Material Realm. I didn’t begrudge them that like some people. As long as they stayed on their side of the seven realms, I was happy to live and let die.

“JJ?” a gruff voice asked as we reached the top of the stairs to the Empirical Library. I was lifted into the air by currents of green magic and brought face-to-face with a lanky man with mostly red hair, although it had started to show signs of gray.

“Uuuurk,” I managed to blurt out.

“Hold on,” Jeff said, waving his hands in swirling patterns that reminded me of Tai Chi, or maybe Qigong.

I felt like a million ants were crawling over me as the green energies rebuilt my body, regrowing organs and knitting flesh and bone back together. My heart started beating, and I started to regain motor control, twitching and jerking. Jeff finished by bringing his hands together toward his core, and I was gently set down on the marble landing. “Thanks,” I said, breathing raggedly.

“Don’t mention it. Couldn’t fix the Viral Load you got tagged with, but I reset it. You should be fine as long as you’re here.”

Damn, I thought but didn’t say aloud because that would have been ungrateful. I pulled up my status effects and saw Jeff was right.

                                                                                <<<>>>

Current effects

Viral Load (Level 1): You have been exposed to a virulent plague. When its incubation period finishes, you will start to experience increasingly debilitating symptoms over time.

Effect 1: ??????

                                                                                 <<<>>>

“Damn,” I said.

Jeff chuckled and crossed his arms. “Don’t see the perma stuff too often. You know how to fix it?”

I closed the window and ran my hand through my hair. “Yeah. Hopefully, someone will have the antidote for me when I make it back to the material.”

“Good,” Jeff said. “Why don’t you come inside, then? We were about to sit down for lunch, and Krissy will be glad to see you.

I figured Gnaeus, Nil, and the others had things handled, so I joined Jeff, his wife, Cheryl, and their daughter, Krissy, in a side-chapel of the Empirical Library and had corn chowder, roasted veggies, smashed-garlic-and-thyme potatoes, and crystal crab cakes. It was fantastic. I’ll say one thing for the Vogthar Invasion, it forced us Portal Mages to level up in a hurry, and once enough of us could open portals between realms, traders started bringing spices and fresh produce to the city of the dead.

Krissy was only two years older than me, so she’d gone through some of the same things I had becoming a young adult in a virtual world. She was quiet, smart, hilarious in an obscure kind of way. I fed her gossip about the world above, and she shared what she’d learned about the time bubbles that occupied some of the library’s main intersections. Then we ditched her parents—after I thanked them for the meal—and grabbed a beer in town. It was a nice break from the day I’d been having.

“Hey, JJ? Be careful out there,” Krissy said, suddenly serious. “My dad said there were new Travelers coming into the game.”

“Sure,” I said. “I met one. Good to have a few survivors we can ask about the outside world.”

“Not a few, JJ, hundreds, and my dad says—”

The world flared with light, cutting her off.

Exactly eight hours after my death, I was sent back to the Material Plane.

                                                                                    ***

I materialized in the courtyard of the Inquisition’s chapter house. I was and still am a fixer and troubleshooter—pew pew—for one of the only organizations that maintained its neutrality during the Crimson Rebellion. Dying was not unheard of. If you thought road rage was bad on Earth, portal rage was ten times worse.

So we tended to pick bind points someone would have to be really powerful and dedicated to respawn-kill us at. That’s a good thing, because returning from the dead comes with side effects.

Second advantage? We got to defile the Inquisition’s most-holy-courtyard. The crystal crab I had for lunch got its vengeance as my gut clenched and everything I ate in Morsheim came up.

“That’s right. Get it all up,” Jen said, rubbing my back.

“What?” I said, popping halfway up, then going all the way down.

“Get it all up,” Jen said, her words turning to acid.

“Hey, Jen.”

“Don’t you ‘hey’ me, JJ!”

“Come on, sweetie, it’s not like that.”

“Then why is your stomach full, sweetie?”

Yeah. So, remember quiet Krissy, the nerdy girl who lives in a library? She had a knock-down and respawn fight with Jen over me. None of that hair-pulling face-scratching stuff, either, because Jen’s a Portal Mage and Krissy’s an enchanter. What gave Krissy the edge, though, was that her father is a Death Knight, so she fights dirty.

Anyway, Krissy and I are over. We’re just friends. As for Jen, she wouldn’t have taken it so badly if she hadn’t lost the fight.

“Look,” I said, “Jeff invited me to their place for lunch, and yes, Krissy was there, but it was just lunch with her family and a beer afterward.”

“A beer afterward where?”

“At a bar.”

“At your bar, the bar you used to go to when you used to date.”

“At the only bar with good beer within walking distance of the Library.”

We went back and forth for a few more salvos. And if I gave you the impression Jen and I have a rocky relationship, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. We care for each other. We respect each other professionally. I love how jealous she gets, and the sex afterward is great. Call it a defect of our personalities if you want, but we’ve been together for three years, now, and neither of us is looking for something else.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just the usual death stuff.”

Actually, that wasn’t true. I pulled up my status page and confirmed the bad news.

                                                                               <<<>>>

Current effects

Death’s Curse: You have died! You have lost 43,740 XP! Skills improve 20% slower; duration, 8 hours. All XP earned reduced by 15%; duration, 8 hours. Attack Damage and Spell Strength reduced by 20%; duration, 8 hours. Health, Stamina, and Spirit regeneration reduced by 25%; duration, 8 hours. Carry Capacity -50 lbs; duration, 8 hours.

Death’s Sting: Suffer extreme physical discomfort and waves of weakness; duration, 4 hours.

Viral Load (Level 1): You have been exposed to a virulent plague. When its incubation period finishes, you will start to experience increasingly debilitating symptoms over time.

Effect 1: ??????

                                                                              <<<>>>

Nil and Jeff had been right about Viral Load outlasting even death. “Damn.”

“What is it?”

“I still have that debuff running from earlier.”

“Right. Gnaeus got the parts you needed to the Free Radicals. They should have that for you in the quarantine zone.”

“The what now?”

Jen’s face turned grim. “There have been complications.”

                                                                                  ***

It’s not a great idea to use your own portals with Death’s Sting active, so Jen transported us to a rooftop near the quarantine zone. I saw the extent of the problem immediately. I could see the bubble—a dome of magical protection around the entire city of Harrowick—as always. But there was a second dome around a block of two dozen houses, maintained by four full mages of the Mystica Ordo, standing at the cardinal points. Envoys of the Inquisition supervised squads of vigilantes from the militia, but they were staying well back of the perimeter.

“I need to get down there,” I told Jen.

“I’m going in there with you.”

I looked at her. I’d like to tell you I was all macho and told her it was too dangerous, but the truth is Jen’s a great Portal Mage, though our specializations are different. Together? We were going to wreck that last plaguebringer’s world. “Thanks.”

“I’m still mad at you,” she said.

“I’ll make it up to you later?”

“You’d better.”

I put my arm around her waist, partly for support because respawning sucks, and we stepped through the next portal together.

We emerged at the southern entrance to the mini-dome, which was also the most heavily guarded. Two envoys and a commissar were standing by with two full squads of militia riot troops. A few of the Inquisition’s flamethrower troopers—the Purifiers—were standing by, smoking cigars and talking like this was just another day at work.

Kaivai, Nil, and its dog, Gnasher, were standing close to a knot of specialists and officers gathered around a field table.

Scrape! the silent hound barked.

“Hey, boy,” I said as the big gray deerhound bumped into my leg, tail wagging. “It’s good to see you, too.”

“How is Krissy doing?” Nil asked with a malevolent, shark-toothed grin.

“She’s fine,” Jen answered for me.

I knew better than to get in the middle of that. I turned to the kid. “You’re back.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry you died.”

“It happens,” I answered, though I suppose that must have seemed strange to someone from the real world. “What made you have to leave?”

Kaivai was about to answer, but Gnaeus’s shouting cut him off.

Gnaeus and an older Inquisitor were at the heart of the crowd, and the Templar was stabbing his finger at a map.

“We need to go in now!” Gnaeus yelled.

“Why would we do that?”

“There are people in those houses, and we’re bottling them in with the disease!”

“I assure you, Templar,” the older man said, “whatever delusions of heroism have taken hold of your brain, those people are already dead.”

Gnaeus’s jaw clenched like a piston. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but I was with him on this one. I took my hand off Jen’s waist, standing tall like I wasn’t hurting, and asked, “Why are you all standing around instead of solving this thing?”

“We were waiting for you,” Gnaeus snarled.

Ouch.

“What the Templar means—although he lacks the wisdom to say it yet—is that the time it takes us to go into the quarantine zone is as immaterial as ‘solving this thing,’” the older Inquisitor said.

I felt my face heat, but I kept my mouth shut when I recognized him as Sir Tarsus, the man who had replaced Sir Berrick as the Seneschal of Harrowick. Deep breaths, JJ. Teleporting him somewhere unpleasant won’t solve anything.

There was a glimmer of mischief in Tarsus’s eyes, like he was daring me to try it, but it was gone in an instant. “Now that we are all here, however, we can start the briefing. Templar Gessia?”

Like the good soldier he was, Gnaeus reined himself in, cleared his throat, and addressed the gathering. “At around 8 AM today, Harrowick’s magical defenses were breached and an incursion from the Shattered Realm was repulsed by the combined forces of the Mystica Ordo and the Inquisition.”

I kept my face neutral, although it seemed to me the Ordo did most of the repulsing.

“We’ve since discovered that the breach was a cover for three smaller incursions from the monstrous realm. A person—or persons—unknown summoned three plaguebringers into the city.”

“We’ve confirmed this?” I asked, surprised. “The causal relationship, I mean. I know they happened at the same time, but it could have been bad luck.”

“It wasn’t,” a man in white cotton and brown leather adventuring gear said. When I frowned, he added, “Mocoso McCluff, from the Union.”

“He’s a finder,” Gnaeus said reluctantly.

The relationship between the Inquisition and the Thieves Union was complicated. The Inquisition ran the militia, and the militia enforced the law. The Union broke the law professionally and on principle, but they were also a great source of information on dissidents, rebels, and apocalyptic cults, which meant the Inquisition needed them. It was your standard tsundere love triangle where everybody hated each other but sometimes ended up making out.

McCluff stuck his thumbs into his belt. “I was investigating the site of the first breach—”

“He snuck past the militia,” Gnaeus interjected.

“I was just havin’ a looksie, and only because you didn’t have the sense to invite me, tin man,” McCluff fired back.

“For someone who’s in a hurry, you sure are slowing things down,” I said to Gnaeus, and he turned red.

McCluff smirked at that. “However I happened to be there, I found the artifact that drew the big scaly thing to the market and immediately turned it over to the Inquisition.”

I could see Gnaeus was about to explode, and I took pity on him. “They caught you trying to sneak out with it, didn’t they?”

“Well, yes,” McCluff said bashfully.

“And the artifact is made of gold, isn’t it?”

“And I want it back!

“We’ll return the artifact to you once the investigation is over—melted down so it can’t be used again, of course,” Tarsus said. “The Inquisition doesn’t need your trinket, Finder McCluff.”

“It’ll still be yonks before I get it,” McCluff pouted.

I shifted my weight to my other leg to stop the stabbing pain in my hip. It’s hard to put up with banter when you’re feeling respawn debuffs. “I don’t see how any of this links the plaguebringers to Bellicosa.”

McCluff perked up. “Well, I’m a finder, aren’t I? There’s another artifact just like it below the ground over there,” he said, pointing to the dome. “And I want that one, too.”

“The surviving plaguebringer and its brood went straight toward it,” Tarsus added. “Survey teams reported several of the inhabitants were infected with the same disease that killed you, Senior Mage. Since the plaguebringer never made it to street level and the victims were mostly vanilla classes—no magic or divine power—we have to assume the Viral Load has been weaponized. We’ve quarantined the area, and I had Stonewalls seal off the sewers, but to Templar Gessia’s point, the sooner we get in there and find out why all this happened, the safer the rest of Harrowick will be.”

Oh, man, I had a bad feeling about this.

“So we go in,” Gnaeus said. “Our primary objective is to assess the threat of follow-on events, so be on the lookout for evidence. Secondary to that but no less important, we purge the area and prevent a city-wide outbreak. The Free Radicals have provided us with masks that will protect us for two hours. We only have enough antivirals to treat about twenty people, so be careful down there.”

Gnaeus went on with the details. I looked at Jen and took her hand. There were some things the Inquisition was better suited to handling than the Ordo, and going from house to house, clearing a neighborhood, was one of them—for better or worse.

“Any questions?” Gnaeus asked.

I raised my hand. “Can I get one of those antivirals? I’m not going to be much use to you if using my powers is going to kill me again.”

Gnaeus grabbed a syringe from his inventory and tossed it to me.

“You’re kidding,” I said, looking at the thing. The needle looked like a drinking straw.

“The main ingredients are a plaguebringer’s ground-up thymus and spleen,” an alchemist from the Free Radicals explained.

Right. “And I just…”

“The stomach or the thigh.”

I looked at the syringe again. There was just no way I was going to be able to do it.

“Give me that,” Jen said, grabbing the syringe and then stabbing me in the gut like it was a dagger.

“Ow!”

“No tears, babe. You’ll get a lollipop when you’re done.” She winked at me, then started pushing the plunger.

And it took a while. Plaguebringer antiviral has the consistency of peanut butter. But it worked.

As soon as the alchemists had circulated the single-use masks, I made sure to grab Kaivai, and we all headed into the quarantine zone.

                                                                                      ***

The purifier squeezed the grip of her weapon and sheets of orange flame filled the small home, stripping paint, destroying furniture, and consuming dead flesh. The flames moved like water, splashing up against the far wall and spilling out the windows. The mini-dome was full of smoke, and the haze glowed angry shades of orange and red.

“Senior Mage Juniper?” one of the Free Radicals asked.

“Yes?”

“Time to change masks, sir.” He handed me a replacement.

I removed the one I was wearing and stuck the new one to my face, and it formed a seal against my skin. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” He handed masks to Jen and Kaivai, and offered one to Nil, but the monster turned him down.

“Why is there disease in a game? Isn’t it bad enough in real life?” Kaivai asked me. He looked pretty shell-shocked, which was unusual for him.

“I’m guessing life in your world is pretty hard,” I said.

“Yes,” Kaivai said, staring at the burning house.

I nodded. “Wasn’t like that before Astraea, at least not where I lived. Sure, there was disease and war, but there was less of it than there ever had been in human history. We heard about bad stuff all the time, because of the news, but the truth of it was, we had it pretty good.”

“It is not like that, now,” Kaivai said, looking me in the eyes. The hardness I saw there was almost frightening.

“Well, still, the answer to your question is that it was like that and we were bored. We played games with war, disease, and survival in them because that wasn’t what our lives were like, so it was fun.”

“But these are people,” Kaivai said, looking at a charred body in the street.

And he was right. The Citizens of V.G.O. were people. They were born, they had hopes, dreams, and aspirations, some of them were fulfilled, and then they died. Just like us. “I don’t think they knew what they were making,” I said, remembering the first time I’d tried a demo of Viridian Gate Online in the OsTech store. That was before the game was patched to let us transition, and before we knew the world was going to end. “Not all of V.G.O. is like this,” I finally told him. “Death still happens, but there are millions of people, both Travelers and Citizens, who haven’t seen war, pestilence, or famine since the Vog invasions. They’re bakers and homemakers, artisans and casual questers. You just lucked out and wound up in my messed-up part of it.”

“I see,” Kaivai said, and it seemed to comfort him somewhat.

What I didn’t tell him was that the game was designed to fulfill the players’ subconscious desires. If he was here, it meant part of him wanted this—at least in the twisted logic of an AI.

“That was the last of them,” the purifier said, cutting off the stream of flames.

“Yeah,” I said.

It took us two hours to clear the dome. Teams of purifiers and plague doctors scoured the sewers—I quickly learned to stay away from manhole covers after one popped ten feet into the air.

At street level, we split into teams and cleared all twenty-four buildings. The tanks went in first, going room to room. Then, the specialists searched for evidence. Some of them were investigators with the militia. Others, like me, could see or feel magic or had other enhanced senses. I found fragments of vials smashed in several houses, surrounded by infectious pools of slime. Gnasher was the real hero; he found a little girl—still alive, but barely—hidden in a crawlspace.

We managed to pull five survivors out, treat them, and get them clear of the zone. Some other people had been at work outside the dome when their families were infected. No one else made it.

But while the sewer teams got into some light skirmishes with juvenile plague-lings, there was no sign of the adult or the people who did this, or why they’d done it. I was exhausted and hurting—the Death’s Sting debuff still had almost two hours to run—when Zara came running up to us.

“We found something!” she yelled, and I felt a second wind fill my body with strength. I was just about ready to pass out, but I could stay standing long enough to put my boot to the ass of whoever was responsible for this.

                                                                                        ***

It was McCluff who ended up finding the entrance. I’m not making excuses, but with twenty-four houses to clear and three search teams, we basically had fifteen minutes to search a two-story, three-bedroom unit before the purifiers hosed it down. But McCluff’s team went a bit faster because most houses were “boring,” until at his last house, he found a key stuck to the underside of a shelf, and he decided he needed to find the keyhole it belonged to. He spent twenty minutes searching, and then another ten. Gnaeus stormed in to pull him out—McCluff hadn’t changed masks, and even the Free Radicals’ protection wasn’t impervious to prolonged exposure.

As Gnaeus was dragging the finder down the stairs, McCluff’s heel hit a hollow spot on a step.

They pried it up and found a keyhole.

Turning the key in it made a wall slide down into the floor, revealing double doors set into the floor that were far older than the house—maybe even older than the city of Harrowick. Wooden vines had been carved in the doors’ surface to make them seem bound shut, and a blank wooden mask with cutouts for eyes sat in the center as if it had been glued in place.

A notification popped up.

                                                                                 <<<>>>

Quest alert: Discord Incarnate

You stand on the edge of the precipice. Open the doors and risk putting all of Eldgard and New Viridia in jeopardy; walk away, and pay the price of cowardice.

Quest Class: Epic, Radiant

Quest Difficulty: Imperial

Success 1: Prevent the Ruinous Druid from destroying Harrowick

Success 2: ??????

Success 3: ??????

Success 4: ??????

Success 5: ??????

Success 6: ??????

Optional: Uncover the Pact of the Six

Failure:Allow a major city to be destroyed.

Reward: 200,000 XP, 2000 Renown

Accept: Yes/No?

Note: this is a Radiant quest. There may be more than one way of completing it.

                                                                                 <<<>>>

“Oh, no,” I said, my mouth dropping open as I read.

“What’s wrong?” Gnaeus asked. “Do you know where these doors lead?”

I ignored the question. “Tell me you got a quest. Anyone? Discord Incarnate?”

Jen put her hand on my shoulder. “JJ, what’s wrong?”

My feet were frozen in place. If no one else had gotten the quest, that meant it was scaled to my level—level 51 after my death and respawn, with XP decay. The last time someone of my level got this kind of quest, we launched an invasion into Morsheim, sixteen years ago.

Everyone was staring at me. Did I tell them, or just open the door and hope for the best? The quest implied that I could stop whatever was coming, but I had no idea what “Imperial” difficulty meant.

Was the price of cowardice the destruction of Harrowick or something more personal? There were too many unknowns.

It was Tarsus, the Seneschal, who snapped me out of it. “Senior Mage, the Inquisition is with you, and therefore the might of the whole Empire is with you. The gods do not give us more than we can handle, with courage and faith.”

I looked at him, almost as stunned by his words as I had been by the quest. The Empire is behind me… is that what an Imperial difficulty quest is? More to the point, if he knew who my “god,” the Overmind of Time, was, he wouldn’t be so hasty about putting his faith in him.

But in a way Tarsus was right. The choice was between hope and fear, risk and surrender.

I stepped forward, grabbed the mask by the eye sockets, and opened the doors.