Weapons Shortage (Wep) - Part I

George swung his legs into his immersion pod, body groaning as it settled into position. As comfortable as the beds were, for the most part, his old bones just didn’t play along like they used to. Leslie, his nurse, set a hand on the lid of the pod and smiled down at him anxiously.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Short? That was a bad attack you had earlier today, and the doctor said-”

He snorted, but smiled at her. She was just doing her best to take care of him. “Yep, I’m fine, Leslie. Don’t you worry ‘bout me. Doc said I could do whatever I want, and I want to play.” He gave her a chastising look. “And it’s just George.”

She shook her head. “I don’t feel right about that, Mr. Short. You’re-”

Shaking his head, he laid back. “I’m just a sick old man, Miss Leslie.”

Her hazel eyes widened. “Oh, you shouldn’t call me Miss, sir!”

He winked before tugging his mask down over his face. It was a custom job, designed to fit over the oxygen cannula in his nose, and he settled it into place carefully. “You don’t like it either, do you?” He chuckled, the sound echoing through the speakers outside the pod.

She just made a face, but she couldn’t help laughing a little, and he grinned as she lowered the lid on him. It still felt good to make people smile.

“Emily,” he said, addressing the digital interface for the game, “start Veritas Online.” Blackness rose, and he sighed in relief as the constant pain of his physical body nearly vanished beneath the flood of new sensations being delivered by the neural interface.

❦ ❦ ❦

“Hup, HB,” Wep said, patting the bristled shoulder of his mount. The boar paused and tried to look back at him, though the thick muscles of his shoulder kept his head from turning far. “We just need to check in at the guild before we head out. JoJo said she has something for us.”

The enormous pig snorted in agreement and turned to the right, heading down yet another bustling road. They had been on their way to the Traveler’s Guild to see if there were any interesting quests available, but instead he’d found a message from his own guildmaster, asking him to check in with her.

Veritas was far different from the long-ago games of his youth. Then, JoJo could have sent him a Direct Message from wherever she was. In many of them, she could even have mailed him whatever she had as a digital ‘gift’, saving them both time and effort. Back then, as an impatient young man, he would have preferred that, but nowadays he enjoyed taking his time about things in game. After all, being here was a thousand times better than being in reality, so the more real it felt, the better.

Soon enough, HB trotted up in front of the Bloodhaven headquarters of the IronSong guild. Made up exclusively of dwarves, it was a good guild for the most part, though he did wish it focused less on raids and more on its merchant branch. Still, since most of the members were youngsters, they still preferred the excitement of battle over the more intellectual pursuits of market manipulation.

Not that he did much in that way himself, these days. No, now he found his thrills in connecting difficult-to-move items with the one person who needed that exact thing. His mama always said he could sell milk to a cow, and given what he’d been doing when he got sick, well, maybe she was right.

JoJo was in her office when he arrived, as usual, but when she saw who was knocking, her scowl broke into a dazzling smile. “Wep! I’m glad I caught you before you left town! Someone found something in a dungeon, and he darn near ate it before thinking to check with me, first.”

Wep’s brows rose. “Ate it? It’s not often a dungeon serves up something safe to eat.”

She snorted. “Right? He was helping out a buddy in the Alchemy Dungeon, and they were so bored gathering ingredient drops from slimes that they had the brilliant idea to start doing shots of Dwarven Kombucha each time they found something Rare or better. They were pretty far gone by the time they came across the boss, and when it dropped an Epic item, the idiot’s first thought was making a hangover cure with it!”

She had Wep’s attention now, and he grinned at her, shaking his head. “Y’got me, lass. Now what did the idiot find?”

She held up a forefinger in a holding motion, and tilted her head, eyes going unfocused. He knew that look, so he waited patiently as she listened to whoever was talking. It had to be someone nearby, since Veritas only allowed chat within a mile or so, but he didn’t let the fact that his guildmaster could have just told the person to call back when she was done talking to Wep bother him. That was just how the kids did it these days. Calls had the same priority as the person in front of them, and while it used to annoy him, he just didn’t have time for that kind of thing any more.

When she blinked her pretty blue eyes and met his again, she offered him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Wep, that was…”

He waved it off. “No worries, darlin’. I’m an old man with nothing but time.”

She snorted. “You’re not that old, Wep. What are you, fifty?”

Well, he did look a lot like he had when he was fifty. The character creation system in Veritas kept people mostly looking like themselves, supposedly to prevent people from hiding behind anonymity so they could commit crimes they could be prosecuted (or persecuted) for in the real world. Not that that kept you from just wearing a mask, like that fellow, FantumHat, who had caused so much trouble recently. Of course, Wep himself hid behind the massive, bushy facial hair that was one of the reasons he’d chosen the Dwarf race. After all, his fifty year-old face had been pretty well known, and it probably wouldn’t have taken long for someone to recognize him.

He just smiled enigmatically, and JoJo shook her head. “You never let anything slip, do you, you old conman?” Her gaze was fond, though, as she came around from behind her big, fancy quartz desk to stand in front of him. With a theatrical sweep, she clapped her hands together and then lifted the top one to reveal… an egg.

An enormous egg, easily twice the size of any in real-life, other than, perhaps, a fossilized dinosaur egg. He could feel his mustache tingle, as it did when he saw a truly interesting item. Reaching out, he carefully accepted the ovoid object, rolling it back and forth between his large, strong hands.

Mystery Egg - An egg dropped by the Enigma Slime. Drop rate: .000001%. Total number in existence: 1. Weight: 5 lbs. Rarity: Epic. If this egg is successfully incubated, a Mystery Animal will be born! Value: Unknown. You feel like this egg may be special.

“Hohohoho!” He chortled. Even his [Trader’s Instinct] skill didn’t have much to say about this little beauty. JoJo watched, rather bemused, as he caressed the egg. “What does the idiot want for this?”

She shrugged. “He sold it to me for ten gold. Apparently, he looked it up on the forums, and it’s dropped twice before. One hatched into an uncommon pet Salamander, worth a few hundred gold, but the other one was just a chicken. It may be Epic, but since what hatches from it is completely random, the odds are good that I just massively overpaid for a parakeet, or something.”

He shrugged absently. “A pet parakeet is worth eight gold from the pet vendor in Elfhame, so it wouldn’t be that much of a loss. Of course, not many people actually have the [Pet Tamer] boon, so the market is pretty slim.”

She shook her head, returning to her seat behind the desk. “How you always know where to get anything, I’ll never know. Still, the egg is yours for the price I paid: ten gold. Take it or leave it.”

“Oh, I’ll take it, and you’ll regret it, Missy. But that’s for you to worry about.” He flicked his eyes toward his visual interface, touching on his current bank balance. The numbers grew larger, and he selected ten gold with a flick of his finger, and sent the numbers spinning toward the guildmaster. He had set his interface to show money as coins, so in his vision, ten glittering gold coins spread over the woman’s desk. What she saw, he didn’t know, but she lifted a finger, and the money vanished.

Shaking her head, JoJo motioned to the door behind him. “Enjoy your expensive chicken, old man,” she said, teasingly. “Some of us have work to do.”

He winked at her as he opened the door and slipped through it. “Us fogies have to take our fun where we can get it. I’ll see you later, lass.”

The door clicked behind him and he vanished the egg into his inventory. Tugging gleefully at his beard, he walked away down the hall, whistling.