Underpowered Howard: A LitRPG Adventure Read online

  “Yes. I’m afraid he’s seen your little … um … I’m not sure how to tell you this. Howard … he knows about Rocko.”

  Jane's face flushed beet-red with embarrassment. “I only used it once!”

  Smiling blandly, I patted her on the shoulder. “That’s what everyone says. Not for me to judge—I just work here. Anyway, you have miles to put behind you and I have free ale to hand out. I wish you luck! Make haste! All of Mythian depends on it!”

  With plenty of time left on the disguise, but not my composure, I turned around and left her there, twisting between embarrassment and confusion.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I turned a corner, then took off the mask. If she was anything like the other paladins I’d met—and she seemed to be—she’d follow the edicts of her innkeeper god to the letter. And when she read those words on the wall…

  “It’s not that I’m completely childish,” I said, working my way back to the Slaughtered Noob. “I needed her gone for a couple of months, that’s all, and this works out fine. A little justice for screwing my Tourney run. Paladins love justice…”

  Upon entering the inn, I marched to the bar and confronted a stormy-faced Bernard. He knew what I’d done and I couldn’t care less.

  “Shut up,” I said when he started talking. “You interfered with my business, counter to your imperative. You’re supposed to help all players equally. From now on, I suggest you do your job or suffer the consequences.”

  “I want you out of my inn!” he shouted.

  “Good thing for me that doesn’t matter. If you need me, I’ll be over there.”

  I turned around and found a table to await new arrivals while avoiding the gaze of the better-off noobs in the room. Bernard was a lucid and he needed to remember that. Not that I had anything against lucids. For the most part, I thought of and treated them like real people. But unlike real people, they served specific purposes in Mythian. If for some reason they stopped fulfilling those purposes, then the “end of the world” scenario Bernard was so afraid of could actually happen.

  I shook my head. That’d be a nightmare. Someone with his power going haywire, doing whatever he wanted…

  Uh-huh. So why do you feel like you just kicked a puppy?

  Feeling like all eyes were on me—because they were—I walked back to the bar, where Bernard stood polishing a mug.

  “I’m sorry I told you to shut up.”

  He frowned, analyzing his work, looking for smudges with a practiced eye.

  Sighing, I added, “And I’m sorry I impersonated you like that. But I’m gonna be gone in two months. Sooner if I work at it. And when I do, I can’t have her chasing after me screwing things up.”

  “You mean keeping you from—”

  “Destroying the world,” I said. “Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear. I’m trying to say I’m sorry. Now here.”

  I held out my hand. Bernard looked at it, grimaced, then handed me the mug. He grabbed another mug, then filled both from one of his ever-flowing ale tankards.

  “To thin civility in the face of astonishing stupidity,” he said.

  I smiled. “I’ll drink to that.”

  A week passed with no sign of Parker, but I wasn’t worried. He had to convince a diviner to help me. Diviners, as a rule, were notoriously difficult to work with because they were in such high demand. Also, Brighton was on the coast—close to five hundred miles away. Could be he was taking a day or two for himself.

  The doors to the inn opened and my newest noob—a guy named Henry—came in and plonked down in front of me.

  “What’s up, Henry?”

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “You know you can’t die in Sanctuary, right? Even if you fell, you’d live.”

  “I did the first two parts,” he said glumly.

  The quest I’d given him had three parts:

  1) Beg for gold in Martyr’s Square until he’d gotten 500.

  2) Buy a single-dose Potion of Flight with it from Darcy’s shop.

  3) Fly to the top of Mall Tower—famously named for its pocket dimension that featured an old, twentieth-century mall complete with a North Pole display. Once there, sit on Santa’s lap to receive a gift. Everyone got a gift, even if it wasn’t what they wanted.

  For all that, Henry would receive 4100 experience points, learn a fun, weird thing about Heroes’ Landing, and possibly get a good item as a gift.

  Henry sighed. “Truth is, I’m afraid of heights. I got ten feet up and had to land again. How am I gonna play this game if I can’t fly?”

  I thought about that. I’d encountered people in Mythian who were afraid of heights, but most of them just plowed through the fear and flew anyway. As Henry had said, how else were they going to play?

  “Your issue,” I said, “is that you fear the unknown. You’re afraid of falling and dying—but you’ve never fallen and died before, have you?”

  Henry just laughed.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Priests have a spell—well, technically a prayer—called Blessing of Bravery. You can probably get someone to cast it free. Here, we’ll add it to the quest.”

  I added a new objected in the Ambulareum titled, Be Brave.

  “There you go,” I said. “Get them to cast the spell. Use your potion, fly up, do the Santa thing, then cancel the flying spell and jump off. Once you realize how safe it is, you’ll find it easier to do next time, even without the spell.”

  Henry seemed dubious. “It’s a good idea, but what if it doesn’t take? I mean after the spell wears off.”

  “If it doesn’t work, you’ll wanna get a pair of these, or something like them.” I lifted a boot onto the table and waggled it. “Worst case, when you gotta fly, you can stay about ten feet off the ground. Just try not to hit any trees.”

  That got him laughing.

  “Here, take this,” I said, “and don’t tell the other noobs.”

  I touched my coin purse to his, transferring 1000 gold. “For both potions. You’ll lose a little XP though, me giving it to you, but not much.”

  “Wow, thanks!” Henry said.

  He reached out and we shook hands. Then he left.

  Another day, another good deed.

  Three more days passed without Parker. I used the time to expand my cadre of noobs to thirty and even picked up a number of high sub-100s. Most of these had exhausted the town’s starter quests but wanted to stick around for whatever reason. My guess was they were running into a problem with pain management and didn’t realize it.

  Pain in Mythian was sort of a chicken-and-egg problem for players. The more powerful they got, the more pain they were likely to encounter at the hands or claws of various adversaries. This required money to buy gear to mitigate it. But to get money, they had to fight monsters. To fight monsters, they had to overcome pain. Chicken and egg. So it was good to help these people, as well as assist them with their class specs and gear choices.

  Maybe I was making up for being so hard on Bernard. Or maybe I felt bad for Jane, currently flapping her way to Ward 3 on a snipe hunt. Either way, it felt good.

  On a hunch, I checked my virtue score for the first time in years and blinked at what I found. Though it had reset to 0 every time I Gave Up, it was currently sitting in deeply positive territory—3762.47 out of 10,000, to be exact. This gave me hope that, yes, I was doing the right thing with this necromancer idea of mine.

  That, or you just think you are.

  That was the problem with virtue. In many ways, it was subjective, and in other ways not. Killing other players was always “evil,” even if you were a psychopath. But killing goblin children in the Swaze Pit wasn’t, not necessarily. It depended on how real you thought lucids were. Then there was the thorny problem of religion. I’d known Hindu players who still refused to eat beef, even though it didn’t come from real cows. Then there was me. I wasn’t religious, but I considered “taking the Lord’s name in vain” bad. Every time I did it, my v
irtue score dropped. Probably because I’d gone to church as a child and the training had stuck. But that was morality for you. Thank goodness virtue was mostly a role-playing stat with few use cases.

  I was jarred from my reverie when the doors to the inn opened and a high sub-100 I hadn’t met walked in. He looked around, taking in all the patrons, then came over.

  “You Howard?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Underpowered Howard?”

  “Why, you looking to arm wrestle?”

  “If you’re him, I’m supposed to give you this.”

  “Well, hand it over.”

  He gave me a note with the name Parker written on it. I opened it and started reading.

  I’m back. Got your info for you, and more. Come by when you can.

  “Ahem,” the delivery guy said.

  “Yes?”

  “He said you’d give me a hundred gold if I delivered it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Here you go.”

  I paid the man, thanked him, and left.

  I exited the medieval-esque world of Mythian and entered Parker’s twentieth-century office, where I found the wiseguy detective with customers. Three gnomes—all lucids.

  “But our cabbages are disappearing again,” one said testily. He pointed at his two companions. “And the other day, all the low-hanging apples from these fine gnomes were stolen! This isn’t the work of your everyday rabbit, sir.”

  Parker looked over and motioned for me to wait.

  “Mister Grilk,” he said patiently. “Once again, I recommend you get a guard dog. Let him roam at night. If it’s rabbits, they’ll stay away. If it’s something bigger, they’ll get bitten and won’t come back. Either way, you win—and you get a nice new dog out of it, too. But I’m not gonna hide in your garden twenty-four-seven working the same case I already solved. And I won’t do it for free in any event. Now … I can look into your missing apples, but that’d be a different case. Same price as last time. Just so we’re clear.”

  The gnomes huddled closely and spoke in a fast language with too many consonants and not enough vowels. Half a minute later, Mister Grilk stood to his full four-foot height and said, “To protect our apples, we have decided to employ your services once again. But we will not be purchasing a dog. You’ll receive your money in a fortnight.”

  “Then I’ll get started in a fortnight.”

  “Good day, sir.”

  The two other gnomes bowed low and said something formal-sounding in gnomish. Then they filed out without so much as a glance my way.

  “Funny,” Parker said, “how only some gnomes speak Hero.”

  I nodded. “Just the traders. Though I did meet a player once who spoke gnomish.”

  “Is that right?”

  I nodded. “She tried to teach me, but I kept getting stuck on the gnome-enclature.”

  “If you ever get a day job, I suggest you don’t quit it. Anyway, I got the scoop on your spell problem. Dory, the diviner, says there are three other ways to get that spell outside the Timeless Tourney.”

  I took a seat and nodded. “Go on.”

  “One way is to reach level 6000. After that, you automatically learn every spell available to your class, as well as the Gate spell.”

  Gate was a non-class-specific spell that, as far as I knew, could only be found in the worst sections of Ward 4, and only after untold years spent hunting for it. I’d known only one person who’d gotten it, and she’d died to the Domination years ago. I also knew about the 6000 award. In fact, Gate was an important piece of my overall plan.

  “What’s the second way?” I said.

  “The second way has you sitting on Santa’s lap for ten thousand years hoping he gives you the spell.”

  If I didn’t have this terrible sense of walls closing in on me, I would have laughed. The mall Santa was sort of a running joke. You could get anything there if you waited long enough. So, yes, his diviner was right, but it wasn’t a real solution.

  “All right, what’s the last one?”

  “The last one,” Parker said, “requires that you simply ask for it.”

  “Huh? What do you mean, ask for it?”

  “There’s a thing called the Well of Dreams. Ever hear of it?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve never used it. You trade upper-ward lives and it gives you wishes. But the Well is in Ward 4, and I’m just a little guy. Besides, I don’t remember the marker.”

  Every major location in Ward 4 could be reached by the Blood Road, and each turnoff had a marker indicating where it led to. Even the Domination had one—an obsidian obelisk a mile out from its lair.

  “Dory says it’s marked by a gallows with a man hanging from it.”

  I searched his face to see if he was pulling my leg, but he seemed sincere.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “In five years, I can do the Timeless Tourney again. But you’re saying if I wait a hundred years, I can go to Ward 4 and trade lives for the spell? Much as I respect your resources, Parker, I’m not too sure about this Dory lady. I think she stole your money.”

  “Your money, and no, she didn’t steal it. I always shoot straight with my clients. Without my word, I’m nothing.”

  I’d been joking with him a little, but my tone must have seemed otherwise. “I didn’t mean to imply…”

  “Quit your crying. Anyway, you’re in better luck than you think.”

  “How so?”

  “While I was in Brighton,” he said, “I hooked up with a friend of mine on the coast who owed me money. Instead of the money, he gave me this. He hunts for them on the shore, finds maybe six a year. Does good business selling them, too.”

  Parker opened a drawer and removed a clear-colored champagne bottle with a ship inside. He put it on the table.

  “My contribution to your cause,” he said. “Which I agree with, by the way.”

  “This thing?”

  “No thanks, please, you’re embarrassing me.”

  “If it’s useful, I’ll pay you for it,” I said and picked it up.

  It was a ship in a bottle, all right. Three masts, multiple decks, sails and rigging, and little miniature men stationed in the rigging and on deck. Etched into the bottle were the words, To emerge at sea, break glass!

  I checked my game log and sure enough, there was a lengthy item description:

  Boat in a Tote (™)

  Many years ago, an overweight skipper and his trusty mate, Gilligar, set to sea with five quirky passengers on a three-hour tour. Out of nowhere, a storm whipped up and they were forced to live on an island formed entirely of sugary treats. Years later, after a number of odd and inexplicable visits from B-list celebrities, the skipper and Gilligar began fighting loudly over who was the prettiest passenger, the redhead or the brunette. Fermented coconut milk may have been involved… The fight ended when annoyed natives from a neighboring island came and killed everyone. Despite being headhunters, they only took the brunette’s head, effectively settling the argument for good.

  Happily for you, Boat in a Tote(™) has nothing to do with any of that. If you break the glass, a boat called the Royal Banshee will appear. It comes with a captain, sailors, provisions, and even cannons. No brunettes, though, which is a shame.

  As I looked into the bottle, I could see the miniature crew going about their ship duties. Well, all except for one. Standing on the quarterdeck was a man in a captain’s uniform. Motionless, he gazed out of the bottle with a frightening intensity.

  At me.

  I looked at Parker. “What’s this for?”

  “It’s your ticket to Ward 4,” he said.

  That got me laughing. “Are you kidding? Noobs can’t take boats to the upper wards, not without fighting a bridge guardian. The second I pass the halfway point, I’ll be teleported into battle and killed.”

  Parker shook his head. “Not with this. It’s a mobile instance. You’re outside, but you’re also inside, see? Others can enter the instance if they get too cl
ose, but you can’t be taken out of it. The way I understand, once you pass the divide, you’ll be treated as if you’ve already beaten the guardian, boat or no boat.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.” I scratched my chin in thought. “So when I get to Ward 4, then what?”

  “There’s an island just off the eastern coast with a binding stone. It’s the only safe place to bind in Ward 4. You’d head in from there.”

  I tried to find a flaw in his logic. This was a tactic I’d never heard of, but that wasn’t surprising. The game was huge, and I’d spent most of it alone or in the company of a small group of friends.

  “And people do this?” I said. “For the Well of Dreams?”

  “Nope. Low-levels with high-level friends use these boats to snag the ten percent XP perk.”

  “Ah,” I said, finally understanding. “They’re doing runs on the Tree of Death.”

  “Got it in one.”

  In the exact middle of Ward 4 was a massive tree with a special fruit that—once eaten—would award a ten percent XP perk called Teacher’s Pet. It also killed you, knocking off one Ward 4 life. I’d never eaten from it because I’d valued my lives. But the draw for certain low-levels would be powerful.

  I had to admit, what Parker offered was more hopeful than waiting five years to retry the Tourney.

  “I’d love to use this,” I said, “but I’m only level 84. Once I hit the mainland, I wouldn’t last ten seconds, even with protection.”

  The air in Ward 4 had a deadly toxin that killed anyone who traveled there without at least 1500 in poison resistance.

  “So then you’ll need an escort,” he said.

  “Who, you? What level are you, anyway?”

  Parker shook his head. “Not me, and none of your business what level I am. Besides, I’ve got apple thieves to catch.”

  With a sinking feeling, I said, “I pay well…”

  “I know you do. And you will pay well. The man who sells these bottles put me in touch with a friendly couple who run people to and from the tree. I talked to them. Real oddballs, but honest, I think. They’ve agreed to take you to the Well.”