Towns and Towers: A New Land Read online

  The last option was something called an adventurer, and its description remained shorter than the rest, stating that the character was well-rounded and capable of proceeding down any developmental path depending on the choices made during the game play. At the bottom, all of the previous class and subclass options were listed in grayed out text. Next to them there were two additional options which were unnamed and simply denoted by multiple question marks.

  Figuring that the adventurer class would leave him with the most options during his game play, Sam selected this class, confirmed it when asked by the system, and watched as his character’s clothing changed to what looked like a standard traveler’s shirt and pants along with a pair of boots. A brief message passed along the bottom of the screen stating that he would receive increases in the skills he used most during each level.

  Curious what would have happened if he selected one of the other options, Sam attempted to backtrack to the previous menu but found a pop up text appear which stated that all choices were final once confirmed.

  Commenting to himself, Sam said, “Well, I guess that’s what I get for not bothering to read the instructions,” before he pressed ‘okay’ and dismissed the pop up text screen.

  The next screen announced that Sam would have twenty-five points to distribute amongst his character’s abilities. It was a common enough thing in these types of games, to give players a chance to customize their characters, but the second line stating that this would be the last time he would be able to attribute any points directly to his character was something Sam hadn’t expected. Typically players received at least a point or two to invest in their character’s abilities at his or her discretion each time they leveled up or completed a major quest. This game, however, looked like it would only be giving him this one shot and then would automatically increase things based on his use of them. Sam made a mental note to keep his attack options open while he played so as not to over develop one area and accidentally sacrifice the rest.

  Clicking ‘okay’, Sam confirmed he had read the message and began looking over his options. Here the game offered a bit more description of the five basic attributes a character could have. First there was strength which obviously increased attack, but to his surprise also factored into what types of gear his character would be able to wear. Next came intelligence which affected a character’s magic abilities and focus, as well as the difficulty of the puzzles he would face. From there agility was listed and described as relating to the character’s accuracy, dexterity, balance, and oddly enough, the chance of scoring a critical hit. Following those Sam spotted something called constitution which determined how many hit points his character would have and how things like poison might affect him. The last area was labeled non-combat skills, and its description spoke of personal interactions with other characters, herbal skills, animal skills, and luck. Next to each of these attributes was a zero, which just begged for Sam to spend a few of his precious points on it.

  A part of him wanted to specialize things like he had in many other games, but he had always found that his characters lacked something critical when he had done that in the past. For instance, in one of the online games he had been playing a few months back, he had specialized as a magic wielding sorcerer and had dumped every point he received into his magic ability. The problem was, when he got into a large fight, he often found his character near death due to the fact it had very few hit points and almost no strength.

  Considering his chosen field as an adventurer, he had no idea what his character would be capable of, but he knew he wanted to try and get everything, so in order to maximize his outlook, he allocated his points evenly amongst all five areas hoping for the perfect balance and pressed confirm.

  Taking a second to look over his chosen character, who was looking around in the game, Sam attempted to take control of the character by pushing forward on the left analog stick. Instead of moving, however, the character shook his finger at Sam and then pointed to the left side of the screen where a white arrow began to blink. Smirking at the game’s attempt to interact with him, Sam pressed his finger to the arrow and dragged it across the screen as indicated. When the new window was fully expanded, Sam found himself looking at a series of questions clearly designed to get a feel for his personality. The seven questions asked were as follows: 1. How would your friends describe you?

  A. Psychotic B. Hermit C. Mad genius D. Cold and calculating E. Adventurous

  2. You came across a bag of money, what would you do? A. Take it all

  D. Set a trap B. Turn it in C. Leave it E. Take half and leave half for others

  3. What would be your first weapon of choice? A. Lasers

  D. Swords B. Fists and feet C. Handguns E. Military grade weapons

  4. When you talk to yourself, it is … A. To remember something C. To psych yourself up E. Because you’re responding to the voices B. Because you’re intoxicated D. To calm yourself down

  5. What was the most recent genre of book you read?

  A. Thriller B. Sci-fi C. Fantasy D. Historical E. Non-fiction

  6. Does the sight of blood make you queasy?

  A. Yes B. No

  7. Would you like to play in 4D? A. Yes B. No Answering the first six questions was pretty

  straightforward, and Sam quickly tapped his way through

  selecting ‘Adventurous’, ‘Take it all’, ‘Swords’, ‘To psych yourself up’, ‘Fantasy’, and ‘No’, respectively. The last question, however, had him stumped because he didn’t know what 4D was. On some systems he knew that there was an option to play in 3D, and while it used to require special glasses to do so, today he knew game screens could present their graphics to players in 3D without the need for special glasses. This 4D, though, wasn’t something he was aware of in gaming.

  Looking up from his game, he thought about walking back over to the kitchen to get the instruction manual and find out what it was, but the ten or so steps it would take to get across the room just sounded like too much to bother with. Considering the question once more, Sam remembered something about the fourth dimension being explained in some sci-fi movie he had watched, and the movie had described the fourth dimension as being related to time. If that were the case, then the best Sam could figure was that the game would probably use the system’s internal clock or whatever to control the day and night cycles for the characters in the game. Doing so obviously wouldn’t make much of a difference to the game play if that were the case, unless certain monsters or demons were only available to fight during certain times of the day or night, but overall Sam figured it couldn’t hurt, and so he finally selected ‘Yes’.

  As his finger came away from the screen, he felt a tingling sensation which quickly spread up his arm, through his shoulder, and across his chest, and then out to every cell in his body. The sensation didn’t exactly hurt, but it scared him a little because he didn’t know what it was. Before he could react to it, however, he felt a sudden pull as if someone had grabbed hold of his insides, and then he immediately blacked out.

  Chapter 3

  Waking up slowly, Sam felt confused, yet oddly at peace, by the feeling of warm sun on his cheek and the smell of rich soil. He heard something nearby like the rustling of a breeze through a tree followed by the chirping of a small bird. All in all, it reminded him of the time he went camping as a boy in the backyard with his father, and how he had woken up then with the birds chirping away in the trees. Groaning, he swept his arm out to the side, feeling the soft grass beneath his fingers until he ran across something hard and immovable. After feeling the object’s rough texture and digging a nail in to peel back some of the bark, he lifted his head and cracked his eyes open to confirm that it was a tree root.

  Looking about, Sam saw that he lay on the ground beneath a single massive oak tree with a vast green meadow spread out before him. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there, but as he tried to wake up, he felt more than a little disoriented and groggy. Turning his
head left and right, he tried to figure out where he was, but as he did, he immediately felt his stomach clench up with an unmistakable queasy feeling, forcing him to stop before the nausea overwhelmed him.

  Thinking back, he remembered being home. He remembered the anticipation and excitement of opening his new system, but he couldn’t remember anything afterwards. He knew he hadn’t made plans with anyone and didn’t think he had gone out with any of his friends to get a drink, but being intoxicated was the only logical explanation he could think of for waking up in a strange place without any memory of how he had gotten there.

  After a minute, he risked another look around and tried to determine if he was in a park he might recognize, or if there were any parked cars nearby where a family might be setting up a barbecue picnic. The good news was that looking around this time didn’t seem to affect him or make him feel sick. The bad news was that not only did he fail to recognize which park he was in, but he didn’t even see anything which belonged in a park. There were no swing sets, no baseball diamonds, and no soccer nets. To add to that, the place wasn’t just missing a parking lot full of cars as far as he could tell, it was missing any and all sounds of traffic. Concerned that he might have somehow really gotten himself lost in the middle of nowhere, Sam got to his feet and noticed that he wasn’t wearing his usual clothes. The shirt he had on was bigger than the ones he usually wore, and his pants felt more like itchy burlap than soft denim.

  Figuring that he must be wearing someone else’s clothes, disturbing thoughts began to plague his mind about the possibilities of what might have happened to him last night. For all he knew, he might have to spend the whole day finding out that he had done some truly stupid and embarrassing things, like those guys in that movie who went out to Las Vegas to celebrate before one of them got married.

  Walking beneath the shadow of the tree, intent on sitting down with his back against the trunk so he could figure things out, Sam placed his hand against the bark and froze as his eyes caught sight of the scene laid out before him. With his mouth agape and his eyes wide, Sam remained still as he tried to make sense of the giant white tower which stood in the distance. Most cities had skyscrapers, but they were plural, always. What he was seeing, there was no city in the world like this, at least not as far as he knew. A lone building standing so tall it nearly touched the clouds, it was unheard of, and yet, something in his brain desperately wanted to make a connection, as if he had seen something that looked slightly familiar about it, but he couldn’t think of where it was or when he had seen it.

  Suddenly, Sam remembered that he had not only received his package the night before, but that he had purchased a new game as well and started playing it. The title of the game escaped him at the moment, but he distinctly remembered that in the intro cut scene there was a tower just like this one. Looking down at his hands, his arms, and his legs, he remembered the weird tingling sensation, like a million electric ants running across his body. The sensation wasn’t there now, but he remembered the feeling of it. Lifting his eyes back up to the tower, he finally felt the enormity of his situation sink home and realized that he had somehow been transported into the game.

  It didn’t make sense, not logically. No one could just enter a game, not even with the best virtual reality gear available, but that was the only explanation for it. He had somehow crossed over into his video game, which wasn’t supposed to be possible. It was like what that Vulcan dude had said in the Star Trek movies, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left must be the truth, or something. This, whatever it was, was ridiculous and straight out of the pages of cartoons and fantasy, but obviously it was real now.

  For a few seconds, Sam realized he was right where he had always said he wanted to be. It was like a dream come true. He finally got to be the star of his own game, and it was an JRPG which could allow him to level up and get stronger, not to mention he had the potential to learn some cool magic, like an ice spell which would freeze his enemies or a weather spell which would allow him to call forth lightning to smoke them where they stand. Thinking of some of the other games he had played over the years, he figured things could have turned out much worse. At least this way he didn’t have a giant gorilla throwing barrels at him from the top of a building, and he didn’t have to manually stack oddly shaped blocks as they fell from the sky.

  Then his inner thoughts burst his bubble and pointed out the fact that he wasn’t the typical teenage boy with amnesia who somehow knows a bunch of cool sword skills. Heck, aside from that one time his buddy Dave had showed him the decorative katana he had mounted on the wall, Sam had never even held a sword. To add to that, he also wasn’t a sleepyheaded boy who somehow overslept and was being woken up by his single parent mother who was reminding him that he had an important meeting to attend. In fact, he didn’t fit any of the typical models of JRPGs. Furthermore, Sam realized that not only did he not actually know how to fight, but he also didn’t know any of those cool spells characters get when they’re in a game. Chances were that he was going to have himself a very short adventure here.

  As he came to this last realization, it finally struck him that he could actually die here, and he had no idea what that meant for him back home. He worried that his body was just sitting there in his apartment while his consciousness was here in the game, like in that Matrix movie. What if Quinn came by and found him? Would she think he slipped into an unexplained coma? On the other hand, it was just as likely that the tingling sensation he had felt somehow teleported his whole body here. If that were the case, it would appear that he had just disappeared without a trace. There was no way to know, and if he died, he couldn’t be sure that the game would simply spit him back out alive. Would he be able to find a save point so he could continue and try again, or was this thing operating on a permadeath setting?

  Suddenly scared and freaked out by it all, Sam yelled up towards the sky, “Let me out of here!” When nothing happened, he raised his voice even louder and screamed, “I want out of this place!”

  The tree leaves blew softly in the breeze again, and the bird which had chirped as he had been waking up sprang from its nest and soared off high above, but other than that, nothing changed.

  Thinking that there might be a special command he could say, he began saying whatever random thing came to mind to see if it would work to send him back to his real life. “Exit. Start. Control Alt Delete. Umm…Portal. Teleport. Home. Logout. Up, up, and away.” He even repeated the phrase, “There’s no place like home,” while clicking his heals together multiple times.

  When none of these did anything, Sam decided to try swiping at the air in various patterns like he had seen characters do in video games whenever they accessed the game’s menu. He hoped that by doing this here in a field outside of a town, he would probably be able to save or logout on his own. Worst case, he thought he might be able to at least learn something more about his situation. First he tried left to right then right to left in front of his face. Then he tried waving his hands up and down, tapping his wrist, and even snapping his fingers. Running out of options, he tried knocking on the tree and still nothing happened.

  After ten minutes of doing everything he could think of, including several things which would look completely idiotic to anyone passing by, Sam decided to return to the spot where he had woken up on the ground and began searching the area for any sign of an exit. Starting with the grass, he tried crawling around on the ground in a ten foot circle looking for any discoloration in the grass, trying to feel for something out of the ordinary. It didn’t take long to determine that there was nothing there, but Sam went over the area a second time anyway just to make sure. Then, standing up, he tried walking around the same area with his hands out in front of him, hoping he might find a cold spot or some sort of dimensional crack which he couldn’t see with his eyes. Fifteen minutes into looking like a lost circus mime, he gave up and dropped his hands back to his sides. Blowing out an exasperated puff of air, Sam tilted
his head back and stared up into the sky to see if there was a spot he might have fallen from, but the only thing that yielded was a minute’s worth of seeing spots from sun blindness when he dropped his head back down.

  Cursing, Sam walked back over to the tree and sat down to try and think of a way out. Racking his brains, he mentally sifted through all of the JRPGs he had played over the years and even some of the other games as he searched for an answer. Considering how many games that was, he ended up sitting there for at least thirty minutes, but in every game he could think of, the only thing his characters had ever done was follow the tutorial and start their adventures. Unfortunately, it looked like he had either skipped the tutorial or there wasn’t one available for him now that he was inside the game.

  Breaking into his concentration, his stomach gave a loud gurgling sound, and Sam remembered that before he had begun playing with his new Pita Duel Screen, he had intended to make himself a sandwich. Shaking his head, discouraged by his situation, Sam looked up to the sky with a ‘why me’ pained look on his face. As it just so happened, that’s when the wind blew, and he spotted a lone red apple hanging off a branch high up in the tree.

  Taking a second to consider his options and game experience, he figured it was worth going after. No one in any of the games he had ever played before had died from climbing a tree, but he had seen a few where his characters became sluggish or lost hit points due to hunger.

  Standing up, he circled the tree once just to make sure that there weren’t any weird birds in it which might swoop down and attack him, and then he began his climb. As he reached for the first branch, he thought about the last time he had done something like this and realized that he hadn’t climbed a tree since he was probably ten years old. To his surprise, however, it came across as much easier than he had thought it would be. Every branch seemed to be placed specifically where it needed to be for him to easily grab hold, and he managed to make it up to the height of the apple in no time. The problem, as he should have guessed, was that the apple itself was quite a ways out on the branch, and he had, at this height, only very thin and narrow branches left on which for him to stand.