Soulstone: Awakening (World of Ruul Book 1) Read online

  “No?” I replied, unsure. “Am I supposed to know?”

  “Because we’re not sure how to stop the virus since it’s practically sentient though we don’t know how that happened either.” He shrugged. “But what we do know is that the virus has created a fictional world called Ruul. And Ruul has rules and an objective like a video game. We think that if we defeat Ruul, the virus will stop destroying our infrastructure faster than we can get rid of it.”

  “And I care why?” I asked, not sure why I was here and what it had to do with the EpiX tournament. “I still don’t quite understand what that has to do with me and why I’m here.”

  “Because we’re sending you into Ruul to try to beat the game and the virus.” He took a deep breath. “We tried with soldiers but that just didn’t work. They always got killed because they don’t think like gamers. So we built an MMO similar to Ruul and used it to find candidates.” He poked me in the chest and his touch was surprisingly cold. A shiver radiated out from the spot where he’d touched me. “You get to save the world. Be happier about it.”

  “What if I don’t want to do that?” I asked, and as I did, he glared at me. “What if I just want to go home?”

  “You know what, you’re going to do this, and I could spend awhile telling you why, but this is faster.” He glanced upward and muttered something that sounded like Klingon. His gaze turned back to me and his grin was enormous and evil. “I do so love this part.”

  My whole world lurched in every direction at once as everything shattered. The next thing I knew the white room was gone, and I was staring at the inside of a laboratory. Only near as I could tell, I was inside some kind of glass tank filled with viscous green liquid. It was especially weird because I felt fine, warm, and well fed.

  A small, squat man with a greasy black mullet sat in a wheelchair in front of me and as I looked him over I realized he didn’t have legs, and oh my god I was staring. I returned my gaze to his face to find him grinning at me in a way eerily similar to the one the bug had. He wore a long lab coat and had a nametag that said Ivan. And as I opened my mouth to speak, I realized I couldn’t.

  “Right now you’re trying to ask me more questions, only you can’t, which is also why you’re going to help,” Ivan said in a voice that was remarkably similar to the bug fairy. “In fact, you can only see me because I am feeding you the visible feed for this room. Remember that when you decide to get feisty in three, two…”

  I tried to respond, to scream at him, but couldn’t because not only was he right that I couldn’t talk, but I couldn’t move, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by abject fucking terror. I tried to scream, to flail, and to do all sorts of things, only I couldn’t. It was infuriating and made me hate Ivan even more.

  “See, we had to, um, cut your brain out of your head and put it in a tank and hook it up to wires to get the full immersion thing working. As I said, technology is not quite there yet.” He shrugged like he was enjoying himself. “But we can put you back. At least, we think we can, and we’re so not going to do that unless you go to Ruul and win the game.” He slapped the tube I now realized was holding my brain congenially, and I instantly knew why fish hated when people hit their tanks. “Now, let’s go back, okay? Blink once for okay.” He smirked, and my world began to fade away so the last thing I saw was his stupid Cheshire cat grin. “Oh wait, you can’t.”

  3

  I screamed in a very manly way, mind you, and this time it worked because I was back in the white room once more. Ivan was back to being the stupid blue bug again, which made sense since that seemed to be his avatar. My first inclination was to rush him and pound his stupid face into pudding, but as I curled my hands into fists, I felt all my rage wash out of me in a sea of overwhelming despair. Even if I beat him up, it wouldn’t do any good. I was trapped. This creepy bug had literally taken my brain out of my skull and put it in a fucking box.

  Worse, there was nothing I could do to get my body back without bowing to their demands. The hot blooded American male in me wanted to fight and rebel, but what good would it do? If I wanted to get out of this alive, I had to play their stupid game, pun intended. Well, I could do that. No, I would do that. I’d play the fuck out of this game and get my goddamned body back.

  “Okay,” I said, looking up from the white beneath my feet and staring at Ivan. “I’m not sure how this is happening.” I gestured at the surroundings. “But I’m going to go with it.” I took a deep breath and tried my best to be brave. It was hard since I wasn’t naturally that brave, but then again, I’d like to think I wasn’t that wimpy. Still, there are times when you have to dig deep down and man the fuck up. This was one of those times.

  “That is better for all of us,” Ivan replied, crossing one set of bug arms over his chest and giving me his stupid grin. God, how I wished I could punch him. “I’m glad you’re listening to reason.” He rolled his eyes. “I was worried you were going to be one of those whiny guys.” He slapped me hard on the shoulder.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked, shaking my head in dismay as I took a step back so he couldn’t hit me again. I needed to focus on the task at hand. I was doing this, actually doing this. Fucking brain stealing motherfuckers. “Do I just go in and start whacking kobolds or something?”

  “Hold your horses, cowboy. I like the cut of your jib, but first, you’ll need to pick your stats. Once that’s done, I’ll port you into the starting zone. I’ll be able to travel alongside you in this avatar, but there’s only one of me, and I have four users to look after, so I won’t always be around.” He shrugged as if to say “what are you going to do.” Admittedly, it didn’t give me high hopes. Even if I didn’t like Ivan very much, the idea of being all alone inside the game scared me. “Fear not, I have alarms set up to alert me to any problems. If you get in trouble, I’ll pop in and laugh while you die, so no worries there.” He gave me a serious look then. “But try not to die because if you do, the game will fry your brain.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, surprise and sheer fucking terror filling me to the brim. No, scratch that. I was way past the fucking brim. I was in a new, previously unconceived level of hysterical. “What do you mean it will fry my brain?” I’d like to say my voice was calm and utterly masculine as I asked, but really, it wasn’t.

  “You saw the Matrix, right?” Ivan asked, and before I could tell him that I had in fact seen the film, he waved me off. “Actually, you know what, let’s just say your mind makes it real. Yeah, we toned down the pain and stuff through some technical shit on our end, but we haven’t been able to circumvent the whole dying thing. As long as you avoid dying, and I can patch you back together. Cool?”

  “Not fucking cool!” I growled, taking a step toward him, which was when I realized I was dressed in jeans, work boots, and a long-sleeved black shirt. It was a little weird because I’d worn this uniform of sorts when I’d unloaded trucks at Walmart after hours during high school and junior college. Was this seriously my default setting? In the Matrix Keanu looked like a fucking badass, and I was a Walmart stock boy? Seriously?

  “Yeah, don’t care.” Ivan yawned. It was a fake yawn, but I got the meaning. Man, I was going to hurt him. I mean, the mind makes it real, right? Unfortunately, before I could make good on that thought, Ivan started talking again. “As I said, your brain is in a jar of goop on my counter. Do as I say or I’ll flick the glass.” His grin turned malevolent. “And I love flicking the glass.”

  “You know what? I dare you to flick the glass.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me.”

  “You make an excellent point,” he said, leering at me in a way that suddenly made me very scared. “But you’ve got this all wrong, kid. See, have you ever seen the Expendables? That Sylvester Stallone flick with all the aging action heroes?” He pointed at me with one grubby finger. “That’s you. Expendable. We’re sending you in as a hail Mary pass, hoping you’ll win the day, but really, we expect you to die.
” He moved closer to me, so his big bug eyes were practically pressed against my face. “So we can sit here and you can pretend to be macho, or we can get on with this. Am I being absolutely clear?”

  “Right, psycho party of you,” I growled, gritting my teeth together in an effort to look a lot less scared than I was. Yeah, I was going full Dark Side and embracing my anger because if I didn’t, I was going to be terrified. What he said made a certain amount of sense. Sure, they’d picked me, but they could pick lots of people and no one would know or care very much. Pissing him off wouldn’t do much good. No, the better thing was to get through this as quickly as possible.

  Besides, once I got in the game, I’d be able to ignore Ivan. Better still, I’d kick this game’s ass and fashion myself some fucking dragon scale armor or something. I wasn’t always destined to look like a minimum wage slave.

  “So, are you going to keep bitching, or are we ready to get to the fun part?” Ivan asked, pulling his flask out and taking a long pull. It was a little weird since I knew his brain wasn’t in a box, so I couldn’t imagine how drinking it did anything at all.

  “One more thing, how are you here?” I asked as I watched him take another pull from the flask. “I mean, your brain wasn’t in a box. At least, it didn’t seem like it was.”

  “I’ve got a helmet.” He tapped his dome with one slender blue finger. “It gives me about eight percent immersion.” He shrugged by way of response, upended his flask into his mouth, and fluttered toward me on his dragonfly wings. “Basically, it means I have to drink about twelve times as much for it to matter. Now let’s get this done. As fun as it is watching you guys roll for stats, it’s sort of been there, done that, and I think Supergirl has finished recording.” He rubbed his hands together greedily. “You know what that means, right? No commercials.”

  “Okay,” I said, deciding to just go with it because I could understand why he wanted to watch Supergirl since Melissa Benoist was ten kinds of hot, and I was secretly in love with her.

  Besides, the sooner I got away from this Navi wannabe the better. Only, that was a bit scary in and of itself since if I died it would be for real. That was fine though. I’d just be careful. It was possible to do anything without dying after all. That’s why they had Diablo Hardcore ladders. I mean, I’d never actually played Diablo on hardcore, but I could have and that was important. “What do we do?”

  “We pick fucking stats!” Ivan declared holding out a palm full of generic white twenty-sided dice. As he did, the background behind him changed, and I saw a representation of a person that reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man sketch with the four arms and legs. Beneath the outline were five attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, and Intelligence.

  “How do I pick stats? I mean, I have no idea what to do here,” I said, staring at the different categories and wishing there was something that explained what they all did.

  “So this is pretty simple. You roll five dice and get to put your stats into each of those categories. Once you’ve rolled, I’ll go over what each one does.” Ivan gestured at the image as he spoke. “Twenties ‘explode’ so if you roll a twenty, not only will you get to keep the twenty, but you’ll get to roll the die again, and assuming the new roll is higher than an old one, you’ll get to replace that value too.” Then he took a deep breath. “So yeah, you want twenties to explode so you can roll them again, and don’t worry, the dice will physically explode.”

  “So roll twenties, got it,” I said, wishing I had my “I Roll Twenties” T-shirt I’d bought from Penny Arcade a few years back. As I had the thought, my long-sleeve morphed on my body and was replaced by the Penny Arcade special. “Wait, what the hell?”

  “Your appearance is in flux while we’re in the white room, so whatever you visualize yourself doing will pretty much happen.” Ivan grinned mischievously. “Normally, I’d have some real fun and make you look at a renaissance fair costumes, but we don’t have that kind of time.” He smacked one of his hands into the other. “Now, move it or lose it, sister.”

  “So visualization helps to make things real here?” A smirk crossed my lips as I took the dice from Ivan. I’d always been good at both concentration and visualization which was why I was studying to be a mechanical engineer. I was really good at seeing the structures in my mind and turning them over. This? This was a cakewalk in comparison. “Let’s do this.”

  “You sure you want to do it dressed in that?” Ivan asked, shaking his head at me, and when I nodded, muttered the word “nerd,” and put one set of fists on his hips. “Go for it.”

  I hefted the five twenty-siders in my hand. They felt heavy and strangely hot, and as I closed my fist around them, I visualized the dice bag I had at home. I hadn’t used it in a few years, but my friend’s mom had made it for me and it was one of my most prized possessions. It’d started as rich purple with a golden string, but I’d kept it too close to the pool shock in the garage for a while, and it’d turned deep maroon which was also cool.

  Opening my hand, I pictured my five twenty siders from the bag because if I was going to roll for my stats, I was damned sure going to do it with my dice. Besides, it’d worked with the shirt, hadn’t it?

  It was weird because while I mentally opened my bag and looked through it, I was surprised to find I had only six twenties inside. I knew there hadn’t been that many since most of the tabletops I’d played, like SLA and Vampire the Masquerade had used D10s. As such, my twenties were a motley collection.

  Not that it mattered because the white bent to my will, and as I pictured my five favorite dice, the ones in my hand morphed to match them. One was my solid opaque blue die with white letters while its brother was translucent blue. The yellow and red translucents were there too as was my most prized twenty sider. It was speckled green and white like an Irish robin’s egg with black numbers and never failed to let me down in a clinch.

  “Anytime you’re ready, princess,” Ivan muttered as I shut my eyes and squeezed my hand shut around the dice. I went Zen as best I could threw the dice as I exhaled. They flew through the air and clattered across the floor in front of us, and as I stared at them, my heart sank.

  “Nice, you got a twenty,” Ivan said, approvingly. “Actually, that’s really not a bad roll at all. You should be proud.”

  As I stared at the dice, I tried to be happy with my roll, but I couldn’t because while I had rolled a twenty, an eighteen, and a seventeen, the other two scores were a two and a nine. Fuck.

  “I get to reroll my twenty, right?” I asked, glancing at Ivan. “Since they explode?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if you should. If you roll a one, it will replace your highest toss. You’ve got three good ones there.”

  “Fuck it,” I said, scooping up my green and white flecked die and holding it in my hand. The rest of the dice sat there, glaring at me with their inferior numbers before dissolving into ether. The numbers they’d represented drifted up in front of me like glowing neon signs and taunted me. Yeah, I was so re-rolling this twenty.

  “Are you sure you want to do that—”

  I cut Ivan off by throwing the twenty-sider in my hand. It flew through the air with the sound like crushed game master dreams and crashed against the floor, bounced, and came up twenty side up.

  “Boo fucking yah!” I screamed, pumping my fist as I did a very manly shimmy of triumph. “Take that and fucking smoke it!”

  Like magic, the two I’d rolled disappeared and was replaced by the twenty. The green twenty sider I’d thrown pulsed once, and I glanced at Ivan in confusion.

  “What’s going on with it?” I asked, hoping it wouldn’t explode and eliminate my rolls. Sure one was a nine, but the rest were pretty fucking good. If I’d gotten that in any tabletop, it’d be smooth sailing.

  “Twenties explode,” Ivan said, and the awe in his voice hit me full force as he turned his multifaceted bug eyes upon me. “You get to roll it again.”

  “I do?” I said, no
w wondering if I wanted to do it. If I rolled a one I’d be worse off than before, but come on that was pretty hard to do. I had a fifty percent shot at scoring better than a nine after all.

  “Yup,” Ivan said, and for a moment he looked like he was going to say more, but decided against it. The silence between us stretched into an eternity as I considered. But hey, if you don’t go big, you go fucking home, right? Besides, having an edge to start with would be really helpful. If not, well, I’d just find one of those potions that always shows up in games. You know the one where you get plus two strength, but your dick falls off.

  I clutched the die in my hand and shut my eyes. As I mentally visualized a twenty, I let it fly. It hit the ground with so much force the world seemed to shake, and as I opened my eyes, my jaw dropped to the fucking floor. I’d rolled another twenty. It seemed impossible.

  “No fucking way!” Ivan cried, staring at me in disbelief. As the nine I’d rolled before vanished, a glowing twenty took its place. The three twenties stared at me from beside the eighteen and seventeen, and as they did, I felt my inner greedy pig rise up inside me. I knew I shouldn’t go for it, but what could possible go wrong?

  Okay, a lot could go wrong, but before I could stop myself, I snatched the dice and tossed it. Ivan practically jumped out of his bug body as a cry of “No!” tore from his lips. “What are you doing?”

  I didn’t respond as the die hit the ground, bounced once, twice, three times, and came up with another goddamned twenty. A smirk crossed my lips as I watched the seventeen vanish.

  “You think just anyone gets one of these?” I asked, turning toward the bug and thumbing my “I Roll Twenties” shirt. Even though I’d done the near impossible, I was shaking. There was no way this was possible, but hey, it was working, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t cheating. I mean, if I was, I wasn’t sure how I was and no admin had shown up to drop a dragon on my head, so it was all good.