"Welcome ter the Slain Rat, travelers," the grizzled old barkeep rumbled. "Shake the dust off yer boots and let me get yer a pull of the finest ale from here to Crestgrove. Plenty of work in town, if yer lookin' fer a bit of coin. I hear tell Old Grimesby needs someone to clear the vermin out o' his fields, and Shyla the Arrow-Wright is tradin' a fine bow fer a bit o' assistance in procurin' yew-wood. Now, mind you stay well clear o' the forest. Dark things abroad these days. Dark things indeed."
His rheumy eyes drifted in opposite direction, seeming to take the shadowy tavern's entire crowded interior in at once.
"Spare us the flavor text, old man," Calhoun said. "We need to find the exit onto a specific console. We have some identifying information, so as long as we can get to some sort of central hub-"
The barkeep's pupils snapped forward. "Oh! Excuse me! I didn't realize you were, you know, people. I thought you were players. We don't get many visitors in Empire of Questing, what with the lack of downtime. Here, I'll get you the real stuff."
He shoved the battered mugs down the bar, and pulled a bottle from under the counter. "Now, this is a treat. Sir Ellingsworth Barq's Private Reserve, 1884. Would the lady like to sniff the cork?"
"No root beer," Calhoun said. "We need to stay sharp."
"I'll take a chocolate milk, please," Felix asked politely, "if-if you've got it, that is."
"And I'll take mine straight," Ralph said. "Or whatever you've got. Just good to get off the old feet for a minute, you know?"
He plopped heavily down one on of the long benches, launching two gnomelings, three shrimplets, and a mostly-naked elf towards the rafters. "Oops. Sorry. Little crowded in here."
"Are these all players?" Felix asked in a whisper. "All at once?"
"Not all of them, no," the bartender said. "A few of them are here to hand out quests, but most of our clientele are level 1s and 2s, a few 3s, maybe. Players start them up to roleplay or try out different classes and usually only play them once. You can't get out of Neophyte's Glen until you beat the bandits in the cave, so most of them end up hanging out here, selling their starting equipment for root beer money."
"Jiminy jaminy, that sure is one heck of a raincloud at the picnic," Felix said, looking over the throngs of fantasy creatures. Humans, dwarves, orcs; whatever their race, most of them were wearing identical-looking cheap peasant clothes and carrying nothing more fearsome than wooden sticks.
"Selling their equipment, huh?" Calhoun ran her eyes over the crowd, picking out a fairly slim young man in a complete set of plate. "Hey, you! You're about my size. How would you like to make fifty Terran Alliance credits?"
"Would I!"
"Taking advantage of the less fortunate?" Ralph muttered. "Isn't that a little heartless?"
"I'd rather be heartless than half-naked, especially when we don't know what's ahead. This is a serious mission, solider. Toughen up."
"Just think you oughta give a little thought to how your actions are gonna affect others, that's all," Ralph shrugged. Behind him, one of the launched gnomelings finally succeeded in extricating her head from the ceiling.
"There a changing room in this place?" Calhoun asked, gathering up her new acquisition.
"There's a powder room in the back, but there is a family of trolls living in it."
Calhoun shrugged. "It'll do."
While the sergeant changed, Ralph and Felix prodded the bartender for more information.
"So there was sort of probe thing, and it took some readings of the system we're looking for," Ralph said, pulling a wrinkled scrap of paper of his pocket. "Uh, I hope these numbers help. Let's see, we're looking for uh, system number XA-145527, and they had Empire of Questing account number 891145654J, character name, ahhh, Scourgica Slayhaven. Does that ring any bells?"
The bartender barked laughter. "Excuse my rudeness, friend, but do you know how many people play this game? There are over fifteen million accounts. Considering canceled accounts and alternate characters, I must have seen, oh, about forty-five million people across this bar. I'll need more than a name if you want me to remember one specific person."
"Hold on, there's a description. Uh, says here she's kind of tall, dark hair-"
"Oh, her! Yeah, I know her." The bartender nodded. "Used to come in here once in a while; haven't seen her in ages, though. Lives in player housing in Windharrow, I think."
"Windharrow?"
"The capitol. Turn right on the road outside and take the pass to Birchgrove. Just a quick train ride from there. Oh, and mind you don't trip over the gnomelings on the way out."
As soon as Calhoun returned from the powder room, looking a lot more like her old heavily-armored self in her new suit of full plate, the party set off along the road. Neophyte's Glen was a sprawling, sun-dappled expanse of orchards and vineyards, dotted with charming little cottages and bursting with wildflowers. Starting characters frolicked in the verdant fields, gleeful using their rusty swords and wooden clubs to bash Level 1 evil bunnies and daisy imps into paste.
But a closer look revealed something darker behind this seemingly innocent bunny slaughter. The smiles were forced, the brows creased with worry, and the battle cries tinged with desperation. One look across the field, to where the numerous abandoned Level 1s and 2s squatted in their endless shantytowns of tents and lean-tos, was enough to reveal the source of their concern.
A skinny elf girl with tangled hair and a smudgy face called out to them as they passed by the bush she was squatting under. "Hey! Silver piece? Potion?"
"Uh, sorry," Ralph said, patting down his leather armor. "I don't think this came with any stuff."
"What about you, kind gnomeling wizard?" The elf looked at Felix with dewy eyes. "A high-level guy like you outta be able to conjure all kinds of great food. Way better than the stale bread we get around here. Make me a cupcake?"
"Er," Felix said uncomfortably, "I'm not really the, uh, conjuring kind of wizard. But I think I have a spare pie around here somewhere."
He pulled a pixelated pastry out of his robe and the elf inhaled it happily, licking boysenberry sauce off of her lips. "Mmm! Peach! Can you do another one?"
"I can't-well, I suppose there's our supplies, but I don't know if-"
"Pleeeeeeease?"
"Negative," Calhoun said, stepping in. "We need those."
"But-but Sugar Pumpkin, look how hungry she is!"
"If we give away all our food here, we'll be the hungry ones when the time comes to retrieve Vanellope. You want to take that risk?"
"Well, well, no, but-"
"There's thousands of people here!" She sighed. "I'm sorry, honey. But our friend here is just going to have to level up on her own."
"I can't level up on my own!" the elf wailed. "Experience only counts if you earn it with a player, and I can't get through the bandit cave at level 1, so I'm stuck here!"
"Then follow us," Ralph suggested. "We're probably gonna have to trash those bandits anyway, right? Just stay back out of boulder range."
"It doesn't work like that," the girl said sadly. "Everyone fights the bandit chief on their own. It's a tutorial." Her head drooped. "And you can't get through it at level 1. I've tried a lot. You just get killed and dumped back at the starting area."
"That's important information," Felix observed. "I think that's worth a pie, right?"
"Honey, no. Your heart is in the right place, but if you keep giving those out, other people are going to notice. We'll be mobbed. And we can't help everyone. Come on, we're wasting time." Calhoun turned and started off again down the dusty road.
"Well, maybe I can't help everyone," Felix murmured. "But at least help you."
He reached into his inventory and pulled out the blueberry pie he'd been saving for lunch. He was about to hand it over when an image leapt unbidden into his head. Vanellope, imprisoned by some nebulous evil, locked in a prison of shadow forever because the others hadn't made it there to help her. His son back home, waiting in vain for his parents to return. And then he saw three bleached white skeletons half-buried by the sands of some post-apocalyptic wasteland game, one little, one big, and one medium-sized and clad in pitted armor half-rusted away...
His wife wasn't just being hard-hearted. She had a point. But...
He couldn't just do nothing.
The pie split into even halves in his hands, and he handed one of them to the elf. "There you go. I'm sorry I can't do more."
It was already half-gone before he turned away, and he knew it hadn't been nearly enough.
The path wound through farms and glades, climbing gradually, until they reached the low cliffs which marked the edge of Neophyte's Glen and entered the mountain pass. Steep walls of stone rose up on either side.
Calhoun was the only one who noticed the elf was following them. She was even perceptive enough to see the dark smear of filling on the girl's face, which definitely didn't belong to a peach pie, but she didn't say anything. Felix was going to be Felix, and leaving a situation without doing something to fix it just wasn't in his nature. It was part of why she loved him, after all.
She was ready for the bandit chief, but she wasn't expecting the chasm. None of them were. Ralph almost blundered into it while gazing up at the unusual (for him) blue of the skybox, and she had to grab his weapons belt and haul him back before he went right over the edge.
"Wow. Thanks. That would have been... bad." Ralph peered over the jagged rim of the precipice at the jagged spears of rock looming up out of the mist far, far below. It was enough to make him miss his nice soft mud puddle.
Calhoun jerked a thumb at the weathered twin posts driven into the ground at the cliff's edge. "I think there's supposed to be a bridge here."
"I think you're right. I can see planks down there. Well... they used to be planks, I think. More like a whole lot of splinters, now."
"Halt!" boomed a voice. An armored soldier emerged from a nearby guard hut built into the stone walls. "Stay back! Danger! The bridge is out!"
Ralph frowned. "No kidding, buddy. Thanks for the timely warning."
"Until it's rebuilt, all traffic to Birchgrove must return to its point of origin!" the soldier barked. "And don't even think of trying to go through that cave. It's filled with bloodthirsty bandits! You'd be robbed and left for dead before you got ten feet! Best just to go back the way you came. Anything is better than risking the cave."
"Okay, okay, we won't go in the cave," Ralph said with a shrug.
"Wh-" the soldier gurgled, taken aback. "You idiot, of course you're supposed to go in the cave! Why else would I have brought it up? There's no other way to Birchgrove, I assure you."
"What about when the bridge is rebuilt?"
"It never gets rebuilt! Not from this side, anyway. You have to beat the bandit chief first, and then you can cross back and forth all day if you please. But if you want to wait around for it on this side, you'd better be ready for a long, long, long-"
Felix began tapping the golden hammer on the end of his staff against one of the bridge posts. On the first tap, the post straightened. On the second tap, the shattered boards and rotted ropes rose from the chasm. On the third, they clumped together in a rough semblance of the original bridge. And on the final tap, they knotted together into a sturdy wooden crossing that looked brand new. It even smelled a little bit like sawdust.
"Buh," said the guard.
"Looks like we're off to Birchgrove, then," Felix said cheerfully.
"Hey! Hold on, now, that's sequence breaking, you can't do that!" the guard shouted. "You get back here and go through that bandit cave right now!"
Felix didn't look back until he heard a high-pitched shriek from behind him. He turned to see the elf girl peering out from behind a boulder, a look of delight and astonishment illuminating her face. "The bridge!" she squealed. "You fixed the bridge!"
She wheeled and took off down the path. He could hear her voice cutting through the sharp mountain air.
"Hey, everybody! Guess what? Guess what? We can leave now!"
As the first rumbles and squeaks of surprise came from the dwarves and gnomelings living nearest the mountains, Felix felt a broad grin spreading across his face.
Who says you can't help everybody?