Keeper Read online

  Light Online

  Book Two:

  Keeper

  By: Tom Larcombe

  Text copyright © 2019, Thomas Larcombe

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, businesses, places, and events

  are the products of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication:

  For my wife Heather, who makes my writing possible.

  Cover Credit:

  SelfPubBookCovers.com/Daniela

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  About the Author:

  Chapter One

  Franklin Greenshaw re-read the message from his superiors.

  Of course they aren't satisfied with the current research we're performing, he thought. Of course they want us to branch out. I always forget that the reward for good work is more work, especially in my profession. So, remote control of constructs it is. Admittedly, someone in a pod could easily control a construct of some sort. Testing it in the game, assuming they get us the general specs for the constructs themselves, should be easy enough. Although I think it's time to break down some barriers. It's time to get the military trainees who've been doing max pod time in an isolated portion of the game world mixed in with the players themselves. See how they measure up. I'll have them set it up so the constructs they're controlling are monster types that the players face off against. See how they stack up against one another. That sounds like a good plan, don't you think?

  Deep inside of him was the feeling that the plan was exactly what he needed to be doing.

  ~ ~ ~

  Eddie had a blast running his inn and doing nothing else, for the first three days. Then he started worrying. The contract for his long term testing of the new pods required that he do all the things other adventurers did and he was pretty sure that sitting around, cooking for the inn, and drinking with some of the local adventurers wasn't what they were looking for.

  I need to get back out into the Forest of Fools, he thought. The rest of the group has been very good about not pestering me to go adventuring. I think they'd be happy just sitting back in the inn too, at least for a little while, but that could spell unemployment for Karl and me. I'll have to ask Opron about it, see what he thinks, but I'm sure he'll tell me that it's currently out of his control. He should be able to give me an informed opinion about what the others that are watching my logs now think, though.

  On the bright side, the three days he'd spent mostly cooking involved a lot of things he hadn't tried cooking before and he'd gained three points in his cooking skill. It was a twelve now and the exclamations from the evening before when the adventurers had started eating and been informed of the Well Fed bonus giving them plus ten percent experience for four hours had been worth it. The word had spread instantly and the pot of stew he'd made yesterday, the one that had given the bonus, had sold out more than an hour earlier than it normally would have.

  He'd had to explain that it was a random chance for the buff to appear on any dish, based on his cooking skill, and that he couldn't guarantee it. He'd also told them that he was working his cooking skill higher and that the higher it got the more likely the buff was. Once again, he'd had several of them ask if there was anything they could do to help him with that. Now there were a few adventurers who were looking for edible plants and different types of meat for him to experiment on with his cooking skill.

  Enlightened self-interest. That's the way to people's hearts, he thought. They're more than happy to help me if they think that their help will benefit them eventually. But for now, I think I need to find some help in the kitchen. If I could get a cook for breakfast and lunch, and maybe to help me with dinner, then I'd be able to go back to adventuring during the day. That would make me feel much better about my contract for the pod research. Make me feel like I'm fulfilling my end of the deal.

  For the moment, he was free. There was never as much business at breakfast as there was for dinner, and customers for lunch were even more scarce than those for breakfast. With the daytime adventurers out adventuring by then, and those who preferred to adventure at night still asleep for the most part, he normally just made a batch of the flatbread and sliced some meats thin so the servers could just slap a sandwich together for anyone who wanted lunch. It also gave him a little bit of time to himself during the day.

  Today, he was going to figure out where the smithy was going to be placed. He didn't want it near the inn or the farm and figured that with all the noise it shouldn't go right near the crossroads either, especially not with his plans for developing the area. Instead, he was thinking that it should go well off the road between the inn and the farm. Opron had mentioned that it would need a lot of stone for its construction, so Eddie was thinking it should be placed close to the rocky spur of the Hammertop mountains that he and Tiana had discovered.

  Even if the spur was technically part of a level fifteen and up zone, the path for new player characters that led from Hammer Hold to the Meadowlands came out through the cave in that spur, so he thought the game might have altered the area so that the orcs of the Hammertop Mountains wouldn't come there.

  Plus, if we have to negotiate with the dwarfs for iron ore that would make the deliveries much easier, he thought.

  He'd been talking with Jern over a mug of ale when he'd found out that the dwarfs didn't do as much forging as they'd like. Coal was a precious resource to them since they didn't find nearly as much as they'd like. So Eddie had another plan, too. He was going to build a series of charcoal pits, right near the smithy, and try to hire a Collier from among the NPCs. He was hoping he could find someone with at least the basics of the skill since his only knowledge of making charcoal came from the research he'd done through the in-game browser the night before.

  If he could trade charcoal for iron, even at a five to one ratio, he'd jump at the chance. Even if he couldn't he was sure that the dwarfs would be willing to part with coin for charcoal if what Jern had told him was true. Then he could use that coin to get iron from somewhere else.

  Tiana had told him there was something she wanted to check on near the crossroads and had gone out to do so. He was getting himself ready to go out also. He wanted to find the land for the smithy and claim it, before someone else did. He'd heard players talking about land claims last night. Evidently Paul had been pretty free with his information to more than just Eddie.

  For that matter, I still need to decide whether or not I want to claim the land between the inn and the farm, he thought. It's about a mile, so my back of the envelope calculations said it would take about a twenty-five acre claim if I wanted to own the land bordering the road an acre deep between the two.

  He'd thought that getting the inn open would reduce his to-d
o list and that he'd be able to run the inn easily while adventuring to satisfy his contract. That hadn't turned out to be the case though. His to-do list was still nearly as full as before, while his time in which to accomplish things had been drastically cut.

  I definitely need to hire a cook for breakfast and lunch. I need to figure out a way to draw in a lunch crowd too, then the inn can generate income all day long. I'll have to think on that.

  Karl and Allie had begged off on going out to check the land for a smithy as well. Karl said he had a major project underway, plus Paul was currently building Karl's house and he wanted to be there to give him input.

  So Eddie was walking by himself, east along the road. At least he thought he was by himself. A deep voice called out his name and when he stopped and turned, the figure he saw didn't really appear to match the voice, at least not until it grew closer.

  “Opron, I was just going to try to figure out a location for the smithy. Want to come with me?” Eddie said.

  “Sure, I was just coming to see you anyhow,” the dwarf player answered.

  “I had a question or two for you as well. I haven't adventured in a few days because I was running the inn. Are they going to be upset over that? I don't want to violate the contract.”

  “Oh no, not an issue. A lot of adventurers will spend a few days of down time before going back out. I figure you could spend a week off before they'd start getting antsy about it. I'm not sure, mind you, but it's my guys studying your logs and they know the players' habits almost as well as I do, so it shouldn't be an issue.”

  “We turn here, I think,” Eddie said. “I decided that if we need a lot of stone for the building we should build near that outcrop of stone that juts south. The one with the cave you came out of?”

  “Makes sense, it'll be much quicker if you don't have to haul the stone quite as far.”

  “Plus, there's light forest nearby, so the rough hewn planks should be easy to acquire also. Assuming I can get Ingolf up there for a bit, or if one of his cousins has the lumberjack skill yet.”

  “Not a skill you want for yourself?” Opron asked.

  Eddie shook his head.

  “I deliberately tried to avoid getting it. That's why I hired Ingolf. I don't mind pumping a few points into intelligence, but if I keep picking up random skills I'll have to pump more than a few in there.”

  “I know what you mean. When I went through your backlogs I saw you pick up weaving and few others that might be a bit questionable,” Opron said.

  “Hey, don't knock it. Weaving let me finish my first quest and it's been useful a couple of times since then. Although yeah, it's of questionable worth to me even if it has come in handy a couple of times. You're looking for suggestions for the game, right? How about you put in a prompt instead of auto-learning skills. Allow people to choose if they want the skill instead of just giving it to them. Just a simple yes/no will do.”

  “That might work. I already picked up a skill that was mostly useless to me also. I went to take a shower in your shower stalls last night and while carrying the bucket of water up I got the hauling skill. Allows me to carry twenty-five percent more without being encumbered and adds five inventory slots. Useless to me since I'm only here for thirty days and really want to just be a blacksmith and brainstorm improvements for the crafter classes.”

  “Heck, any adventurer would kill for that skill I bet. Not so common?”

  “If I remember right, hauler is classified as rare, or maybe very rare, for adventuring types, but only uncommon for workman types like crafters and some of the NPCs.”

  “They break it down that much, changing commonality by class?”

  “Even more than that. The AIs tried to put some logic into the assignments of skills and who should get access to what. There are minimums on stats for some, classes adjust the chance of getting some, all kinds of modifiers. Even I don't know all of them.”

  “Ah, here we are,” Eddie said.

  They'd just come into view of the spur of the mountains that jutted south into the Meadowlands. Eddie looked around, searching for a mostly level area with few trees. Nothing quite suited his tastes perfectly, but Opron started wandering around himself too, looking intently at the surroundings and, amusingly enough to Eddie, the view provided from different areas.

  “Really, the view?” Eddie asked.

  “Hey, this is supposed to be my vacation. I'd like a good view of the mountains if I can get it,” Opron replied.

  Eddie chuckled, but followed the dwarf. He'd wandered around the edge of the outcropping on the side closer to the inn. About a hundred yards away from the outcropping on that side was a small stream that ran through a clearing in the woods. The clearing was mostly level and Eddie walked around it, estimating its size.

  “This spot would work. What do you think of the view?” Eddie asked, smirking.

  “Depends, can you get your guys to clear out the trees on that arc,” he said gesturing in a wide arc with his arm, “for the lumber?”

  Eddie grinned, still amused but unwilling to say anything about the dwarf's desire for a view.

  “Yeah, I'm pretty sure they can do that.”

  “Good, then this works for me.”

  “I'm going to put some charcoal pits nearby as well. They'll give you fuel for the smithy and let me trade with the dwarfs maybe.”

  “Now that's a good idea. That's exactly what you've been doing so far, isn't it? Just following your wild, hare-brained ideas?”

  Eddie glanced around at the mention of hares. He hadn't considered that there might be wildlife nearby. Even so, he wasn't going to worry about it for himself. At level five, he was no longer worried about most of the creatures in the Meadowlands. Opron, on the other hand, might have a problem if there was anything hostile nearby, or if they were in anything's territory that the current resident decided it had to defend.

  “Let me check the area, make sure there aren't any hostile mobs,” Eddie said.

  “There shouldn't be, there shouldn't be any hostile mobs in the Meadowlands,” Opron said.

  “Tell that to the Nubbies that attacked Karl and I back when we were still level zero.”

  “In the Meadowlands?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “I'll need to make a note of that. There aren't supposed to be any hostile mobs here.”

  “Well, they were defending their lair,” Eddie said. “We were right nearby it and trying to dig in through their back door.

  “Oh, that explains it then,” Opron said, relaxing.

  “So I'm just going to check the area and see if there's a lair of some sort near here.”

  “Go for it. I'm going to relax for a bit.”

  Opron settled into the shade of a tree, staring at the mountains.

  “Lucky!” Eddie called, but he didn't get a response.

  “Huh, I bet she's down eating the fish out of my pond,” he said. “It's like she wants a constant case of fish breath to breathe on me. But I sure could've used her nose to sniff out anything in the area.”

  He wandered around for a few minutes, looking for tracks, scat, or anything else his hunting or tracking skills could help him detect. When he didn't find anything recent he went back to the clearing. With a glance at Opron he decided the dwarf was asleep since his eyes were closed.

  He drew out the claim stakes, ready to claim the land for the smithy and charcoal pits. As he prepared to set the first stake, Opron startled him.

  “What are those? Are those claim stakes?”

  Eddie's hand dropped to his sword, and his head swiveled to find the dwarf staring at him.

  “Don't do that, I thought you were asleep,” he said, hand dropping away from his sword hilt. “Yes, they're claim stakes. You haven't seen them before?”

  “Nope, I've seen the code for them, but that isn't the same as seeing them. They look like tall surveyor stakes, like the kind they use in the real world.”

  Eddie wanted to pose his question about which world
felt more real to the dwarf, but he realized that Opron might not have been in the game long enough to understand the feeling Eddie was unable to express in words. He'd talked to Tiana about it, and she got it, as did Karl, but Opron? Maybe in another week he'd try to explain it to the dwarf.

  Which might even be part of the issue. He's in a dwarf body, so it has to feel less normal to him just from that, Eddie thought.

  “Yeah, they're claim stakes. I made up a few this morning to use here.”

  “Cool, carpentry gives you those?”

  “That's how I get them. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a version for stonemasons too though.”

  “Hmmm, if there isn't, I'll add one.”

  Opron's eyes unfocused as he made notes to reference once he was out of the game.

  Eddie went ahead and set the stakes, adjusting the last two until he had a four acre square. He figured on one acre for the smithy and whatever it needed and the rest for charcoal pits and wood stacks.

  Now he just had to hope that the location was close enough to the Hamlet to count towards his Developmental Issues quest. He pulled up the help file on it again.

  Developmental Issues III:

  This quest is all about developing: The Meadowlands.

  To complete part III of Developmental Issues you must build two of the following buildings and open them to the public:

  Blacksmith

  Leatherworker

  General Store

  Tavern

  Temple

  Rewards:

  + 5000 Experience

  + 100 Gold Pieces

  Increased reputation and renown with inhabitants of: The Meadowlands

  It doesn't specify how close to the Hamlet it needs to be, he thought. Maybe it just has to be in the Meadowlands and not the hamlet itself, they are different quests after all. I wish there were more information on it, but I know better, especially with the opaqueness of all the settlement type help files. I'm going to guess that it will be close enough, especially if it's owned by me and there's an NPC from the Meadlowlands working it, well, there will be once Opron gets an apprentice anyhow.