A/N: Again, liberties have been taken with game release dates. More Skyrim! Next chapter will have some Myka/HG. I'm hoping this one was worth the LONG wait - I'm so sorry :|
Pete is the last to sleep and the first to wake up. Claudia is still all but passed out beside him with a good, respectful distance between them, and he's not surprised. Despite the bed looking hard and lumpy, it's actually soft and comfortable, not to mention warm. He swings his legs off the bed, yawns and stretches out, then he reaches for the set of men's clothes on the dresser.
He checks Claudia is still asleep, strips off and gets dressed in the new clothing and then he steps to the window, looking out over Whiterun. It's definitely a pretty city, with towers and buildings and people coming and going, but there's something about it that doesn't sit right. Not enough people, not enough noise and movement.
It's not quite alive.
"What time is it?" Claudia asks, sleepily, as she wakes and sits up, rubbing at her eyes. "Wait... where..." She looks around. "Oh."
"Yeah, I'm not sure they've actually invented clocks yet," says Pete. He tosses the other set of clothing at Claudia. "You get changed. I'm going to go and find a toilet."
"Good luck with that," mutters Claudia.
Pete wanders through the inn looking for a toilet for a few minutes before he gives up and goes outside, in the gutter, hidden behind the houses. "Video games," he mutters to himself as he goes, "never... have... toilets."
He pulls his clothing straight and walks around the inn to head back inside. He's just about to turn towards the doorway when a woman barges straight into him.
"Oh! I'm so sorry!" she exclaims, grabbing his arm to stop from falling down. "I was chasing my daughter and I didn't see you there."
"That's okay." Pete smiles and keeps his arm out for support, preventing her from stumbling again. "I'm Pete."
She smiles. "Carlotta Valentia."
"Nice to meet you, Carlotta Valentia," says Pete with his winning grin. "Where did your daughter go?"
Carlotta sighs. "Don't worry. She'll be back. I told her she couldn't go and play until she helped clear up and, well..."
"She went and played anyway." Pete nods. "Yeah... I was like that at her age."
"Pete!" Claudia appears almost from nowhere, now wearing the blue clothing Hulda provided. She looks gorgeous and it takes a second for Pete to stop looking, then he says, "Hey Claud. I was just talking to Carlotta here..."
Claudia gives Carlotta an awkward, stiff smile. "Hey," she says. She looks back at Pete. "She's a pixel, Pete," she says, quietly.
"Excuse me, what did you say?" says Carlotta.
"Nothing. She didn't say anything. Don't worry." Pete shoots Claudia a glare. "We should be going now, though. It was nice meeting you, Carlotta. Maybe I'll see you again soon?"
"I'd like that," says Carlotta, and disappears back into the lacking crowd.
"If we get stuck here," says Pete, "she's going to be our neighbour."
Claudia shudders a little. "Neighbours with pixels. I did not expect this to be my life."
Pete shrugs. "Nor did I," he says. "Now, what should we do today?"
There's a moment of silence in which they both muse the fact they're trapped in a world they don't know and then they retreat back inside to sit on the bed in the inn, side by side. "I've been thinking," says Claudia and Pete looks at her. "Games, with the exception of maybe the Sims, depending on who is playing, are always dangerous. Monsters and stuff, you know?"
"Yeah, sure. That's the point, right?" Pete turns around a little so instead of sitting side-by-side he's facing her. Claudia doesn't move, she just sits with her hands folded between her knees with her Serious Face on.
"What if we die?" She finally looks at Pete. "Games are designed so you die more often than you statistically would in real life. We could be eaten by a wolf or shot by a Turian or attacked by a killer mongoose!"
"Claud," says Pete.
"No! No but what if there are bees! Some games have bees!" She jumps to her feet, wringing her hands and spins around to face Pete. "I don't want to die because I forgot to put my long fall boots on or I don't know how to say 'hello' in some Skyrim tongue or—"
"Claudia!" Pete jumps up and grabs her by the upper arms, squeezing hard enough to snap her out of her babbling. "We're not going to die," he says, with a smile. "We've been through worse than this and if we can do things that should be confined to games in real life we can deal with games."
Claudia breathes in slowly and nods. Pete keeps his hands on her shoulders and then finally she looks up and meets his eyes.
He smiles. "Okay?"
She nods. "Okay," she says and smiles back. "Okay. We'll be fine."
"Jump in the nearest body of water," says Pete and Claudia wrinkles her brow in confusion.
"What?"
"If there are bees."
Claudia bursts out laughing.
"You must leave now," says a voice in the doorway and they turn to see Hulda standing there. "Your twenty-four hours are up."
"All right." Pete pulls away from Claudia, who sighs and sags a little without the feel of his hands holding her in place. "Is there... um..." He ponders for a moment. "A blacksmith in town, maybe?"
"A blacksmith?" says Claudia.
"Weapons. Everyone in this ga—" Pete breaks off and looks at Hulda before quickly correcting, "Town. Everyone in this town has weapons. I figure we need some too."
"Right!" Claudia steps beside Pete and looks at Hulda, who looks utterly confused by both of them.
"There's a blacksmith down that way," she says. "Straight down the hill and to the bottom, to the left of the main gates."
"Excellent," says Pete. "Thank you."
Hulda smiles. "Come back here if you want another room."
Pete gives Hulda a dazzling smile. "We will," he says.
Claudia rolls her eyes, grabs Pete by the elbow and hauls him away.
"You know, it wouldn't hurt to make friends with the locals," Pete says, grumpily, as Claudia hauls him away from Adrianne Avenicci. He pulls his elbow free and looks down at the sword he purchased with the gold he made chopping wood the night before. "Nice," he says.
"It's not friends you're making," says Claudia, a little huffily, and tests out her bow and dagger set.
Pete stares at her. "You really think I'd do that to you?" he says.
She looks at him, surprised. "What?"
"Go off with some pixel and leave you alone." He slips his sword into its sheathe on his belt. "I'm not that bad."
Claudia has the good grace to look a little ashamed of herself for assuming he would, even as she wonders about her own gut reaction to what he said. "So," she says, wanting to distract herself and him, "what's the plan?"
"Adrianne says there's a bandit cave nearby. I thought we could go and check it out. Kill some bandits and use the money to get food and find somewhere to stay for the night again. I figure we'll be switching games again soon... we just gotta stay alive until we do."
"And a bandit cave is the best way of staying alive?" says Claudia, wrinkling her nose up and squinting at Pete against the sunlight.
"It's the best way of making a living in a game like this, isn't it?" says Pete.
Claudia nods. "Good point," she says. "Let's go."
It takes them a while to find the bandit cave with only a map and no access to Google to search for a walkthrough and by the time they find it they're already getting tired. "This is ridiculous," Claudia says and collapses onto a barrel near the entrance to the cave. There are bottles of ale and mead sprinkled all around so she grabs the nearest one and takes a few languid swallows to clear the taste of unbrushed teeth from her mouth. Pete drinks from the nearest stream and then nods his agreement.
"When you're running around in circles on games you never realise just how unrealistic it is," he says. "We're fit but... this is stupid!"
"You're calling me fit, huh?" says Claudia, smirking.
Pete looks flustered for a moment before he says, "Ha, ha," and turns away to look at the cave. "Are we going in or should we rest here a while?"
"I'm good to go if you are," says Claudia and draws her bow. "I know what these Bethesda caves are like," she says by way of explanation, "something bad will be in there."
"All right." Pete pulls his own sword and they step through the cave entrance and into... Not the cave.
They're in a passage, not made of rock or stone but instead made of some strange, bright white... thing. It doesn't look real to the point that Claudia steps back out of the passage and hangs around on the lip of the cave, still just outside in Skyrim itself. There are lines of code flitting backwards and forwards across the white and there seems to be a path, leading from where Pete and Claudia are standing into another cave.
"What is this?" says Pete, very awed and a little afraid.
"It's a loading screen... of course it is," says Claudia.
"What?"
"There are loading screens between areas... like when you go through doors and that. But in some places, the seam isn't... exact." Claudia smacks her hands together a little, as though that will illustrate the point she's trying to make. Pete looks blankly at her. "You know the Umbilicus? Imagine if when you entered the Warehouse, because the Umbilicus was too boring, you just emerged straight into Artie's office."
"Right...?"
"In between those two places you have a loading screen, which dumps all the outside world and instead loads the inside world – the Warehouse and Artie's office. But our minds tell us that we should have something between the door and the office and so when we're in the game..." She gestures at the white space. "We have this."
"Huh," says Pete.
"We should," says Claudia and gently steps off the edge of the map and onto the white space, "be able to get across."
Pete gives her a disbelieving look, but she carries on along the almost-path regardless and reaches the mouth of the cave on the other side so Pete follows and when he reaches the other side he grins at Claudia. "You're way too smart to play video games."
She scowls at him. "I'm going to pretend you never said that," she says and ducks inside the cave.
They take three bandits down in the first room and sneak through into the second. "How was this a good idea?" Claudia hisses, crouched behind a rock with Pete. She's sweaty and tired and her arm is starting to ache from firing so many arrows at the heads of unsuspecting bandits. Pete doesn't look much better, with a cut on his forearm from fighting a bandit with his sword and muck on his face from falling face-down in the dirt at least once, just to be saved by one of Claudia's arrows.
"I'm starting to wonder," says Pete. He keeps his back against the stone, trying to remain quiet and undetected and failing. Claudia peeps up over the top.
"That," she says, "is not a normal bandit." She drops back down. "Oh god!" she exclaims.
"What?" says Pete.
"I think this is a vampire cave."
"What," says Pete.
"They had vampires in Oblivion. I guess it makes sense to have them in Skyrim too..."
Pete makes a strange hand movement.
"What?" says Claudia.
"Sparkle?" he mouths, looking terrified.
"No. Worse." She sighs. "Maybe I'm wrong." She peeks up over the rock again then drops back down. "Nope. I'm not wrong. We're screwed."
"We're not screwed," says Pete, keeping his voice low. "They're just vampires. We'll just... shoot at them until they go away."
"They're vampires," hisses Claudia. "And worse still, they're AI vampires. They don't go away. We need to get out of here."
Pete opens his mouth but at that moment a light hits them from the nearby wall. A wooden door appears in the cave wall and opens.
"Escape route?" Pete suggests.
"So far it's gotten progressively worse..." says Claudia.
"Let's risk it," says Pete and grabs her by the hand, hauling her to her feet and running towards the door. The vampire turns, hisses and hits Pete with a bolt of something from its hand. They fall through the door together and slam to the ground on the other side.
The door disappears and they're alone, the vampire trapped on the other side.