So Long, Amigo!

The wooden horse raid boss was nothing but a puddle of its former self, draining away to each of the corners of the increasingly less demonic looking throne room. Thanks to the patch I sent out, things started to shift back to a more regal looking chamber, likely meant for council meetings and other official business.

Once the room was fully returned to its former glory and the water gone, there was a little present on the ground. An item dropped from defeating that construct. Rose had a prompt to open it up and we peeked inside.

A little wooden horse toy floated out of the box, then it became extremely bright. The form of it warped and changed until a jolly looking guy was standing in front of us.

“Ho ho hold the phone!” said the jolly man in overalls. “W-what happened here? Who are you people?”

-SANTA!?!?(✪o✪)-

This was Mayor Pioppel. He was kind of a parody character. He looked and sounded like Santa Claus because we almost themed this market city after the north pole. That had to change when it got moved to the southern end of the map where things were much hotter.

“Uh, well… You see…”

We explained that someone had taken over his city and apparently turned him into a raid boss. He didn’t have the proper responses to actually reply appropriately, but he seemed to get the jist of it.

“The excitement began when a fellow entered our fair city,” he said. “A gift! We took it. I was trapped. And you saved us!”

He did his best to form a coherent explanation with whatever disjointed audio files he pulled out of the directory, but I got the message.

“Ho ho ho! What a merry day this is! I must properly thank you with a gift! What can I do for all of you?”

“A gift?!” Tensei got all excited and spun around mid-air. “Gimmy gimmy!”

If he was willing to give us a reward, there was one thing I could think of that would be a huge help on our journey…

💻⚔️💻

Mayor Pioppel left to gather up a collection of different spell books that we could learn from. He returned from his library with exactly three grimoires wrapped up in a nice little bow. It was Christmas morning as far as I was concerned.

“Fire ball… Lightning strike… Ice ray,” I read out each of their titles.

-ICE-RAY! That’s your super hero name. GET IT?! XD-

I gave Rose a pity chuckle for that one, but Tensei was cracking up like a riddler.

These were all beginner level spells, but it was going to be a lot of help in a fight since spells were wisdom based, and that stat was fairly high for me.

“Ho ho h-if only I had more spell books to give you,” he said in a dramatically downtrodden voice that made me snicker. “But it’s the best we currently have in the city's storage houses.”

The economy of this game was largely dependent on items that players traded with NPC’s. And since the game hadn’t released yet, this market city was pretty starved of stock. But still, this was more than we had before.

-Nah, don’t sweat it, Santa-man! This is great.-

Now that we had these, I could take a little time later to read them over. Learning a spell wasn’t as easy as just opening up the book and having it do some flashy light show. The player actually needed to read through it. They were short, but still quite a bit of effort with three of them to work through.

Anyways, we were finished here. If we couldn’t take on Lord Troja, then we just needed to move on and hope we could deal with him later. Something was telling me this was a blessing in disguise though, since I doubted we had the power to defeat him yet.

💻⚔️💻

“We did it!” Tensei cheered as she hugged my head tightly once we were outside the city hall. It was nice to see that big wall gone and the city returned back to its bustling, non-pixelated state. “One more raid boss down, and The Virus weakens even more!”

“Y-yeah…” I turned to Zorro, who’d been very quiet this whole time, and gave him a stern look. His trademark smile was missing. Replaced with a mild frown. “Zorro, I wanted to say…”

The_Zorro: -Señor, I hope it isn’t too much trouble for you, but I must leave now and pick up my daughter from school. So I’ll be logging off.-

He was in a hurry to leave. What time was it in the real world anyways?

Zorro was a mysterious guy and definitely had some secrets, but he did a lot for us. Hopefully he didn’t just disappear so we could work with him again.

“Alright.” I traded my sternness for a smile. “You’ve been a big help, man. You saved my life more than once, so I could never call you a burden.”

-Three cheers for Zorro!-

-HIP HIP HURRAY!(つ≧▽≦)つ -

-HIP HIP HURRAY! \(´∀｀)/ -

-HIP HIP HURRAY! ٩( ᗒᗨᗕ )۶-

“Hip hip, hurray!” Tensei cheered along with Rose.

Rose got me into the shaking hands co-op emote. Zorro just stared at me for a moment and didn’t complete the shake for a good few seconds.

The_Zorro: -Hey… I heard a rumor…-

“A rumor?” my brow arched.

The_Zorro: -Abo-

The_Zorro: -About Lord Troja.-

I froze my focus for a second and kept my eyes peeled on Zorro.

The_Zorro: -He’s heading north to a place called Mothbordon.-

“That’s the next city over,” Tensei commented. “The Glitched there are pretty bad too from what I remember.” She once more pulled out her laundry list of bugs and skimmed it over until pointing out a whopping 1000 issues. “I think it would be a good idea to go there.”

I agreed, but there was a little more important issue to focus on first here.

“Where did you hear this rumor?” I asked him.

There were so few times he would have had to learn anything we couldn’t

The_Zorro: -I just happened to catch wind of some whispers while I was sneaking into the fortress.-

That didn’t fully convince me, but it was enough of an excuse for us to dial back the pressure.

“Well, thank you for that info. It really means a lot.”

The_Zorro: -It was my pleasure. Good luck to the three of you! May we meet again soon!-

And with that, his character shimmered for a moment and faded from existence. We got a message saying that he’d left the party too.

Not even a second later the guards who dragged us through the streets came out and stood in front of all of us in a line formation, then they bowed with their heads down deep.

“We cannot thank you enough, player, for helping free us from the wretched influence of that tyrant, Lord Troja. Please, forgive us.”

“Oh, I mean…” this kind of formal apology was a lot to take in all at once. “N-no… Don’t worry about it.”

“But, sir. You saved us! And you defeated his awful creation. We are grateful. What is your name?”

“Uh…”Rose made our in-game name so silly. It said ‘RosRay_the_Lover.’ “It’s Ray.”

“Ray?” the guard captain furrowed his brow. “That sounds… familiar to me… but why?” he said as he brushed his chin, curiously.

Rose started doing her little chat text thing, but didn’t send it so we could private message.

-Ray, this is what I wanted to talk to you about.-

-The guards. Now that Zorro’s gone, just hear me out here.-

-Don’t say anything to Teny-chan, because this involves her too and I don’t know what’ll happen if I bring it up.-

Tensei was going to get suspicious if I just stood there looking at Rose’s chat, so I needed to distract her for a moment.

“Hey, Ten…” I called out to her. “Mind doing us a favour and forgiving all of those guards by patting them on the head ten times each?”

She pointed to herself like she wasn’t sure if I was asking her, but then shrugged and went over to fulfill my request.

“She's busy. What’s up, hon?”

-Okay, so listen. Doesn’t it seem a little odd that those guards are able to say things you guys didn’t record in the studio?-

-Think about it. Why did anyone record your name for that specific voice line the guard just said? Or Lord Troja’s? Something is wrong with that. They speak like real people, not pre-recorded video game characters.-

We ‘almost’ were going to have computer generated voices for some quests and player names, but that was scrapped due to bad public reception. So I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

-And, I love Teny-chan, but she can talk like a normal person too.-

“Yeah, I know. I was avoiding mentioning it, personally.”

-What could it mean? How is this possible?-

“Considering I got sucked into a game, anything is possible at this point,” I said. “But maybe we’ll just need to ask Tensei when the time is right.”

-I think Zorro knows something more about this game. He didn’t really bat an eyelash when I explained your situation. Then he didn’t want to kill those guards. They must be special. Plus, I have a suspicion he didn’t speak up during the rescue because he didn’t want the guards to pick up on our chat.-

“And how the heck did they see our chat to begin with…?” I added. “Only Tensei could see what you say so far.”

These were some seriously big questions we needed to look into. It was possible that the guards were just super advanced AI, which was what I thought was going on with Tensei, but why would some random NPC guards of all characters get that treatment?

And personally, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust Zorro. He was a good man at his core. But I agreed with Rose that he knew something more about this game. Maybe info that he couldn’t share.

-Look sharp! Teny-chan’s coming back!-

“I head patted all the guards, ten times each, like you asked.” She came back with a pleased, but impatient smile. “Are we done here?” Tensei asked.

-Hey, can we take a look around the city? This place looks really pretty now that it’s not a pixel nightmare.-

The sun was setting, so we were entering nighttime. Everything was warmly lit up from lanterns and magical lamps set up all around. The twilight sky really brought it all together nicely. It screamed romance to me, and I assumed Rose felt the exact same way.

“Yeah, why don’t we check this place out for a bit?” I smiled.