Forever Fantasy Online Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Content Warning

  Chapter 1 - Tina

  Chapter 2 - James

  Chapter 3 - Tina

  Chapter 4 - James

  Chapter 5 - Tina

  Chapter 6 - James

  Chapter 7 - Tina

  Chapter 8 - James

  Chapter 9 - Tina

  Chapter 10 - James

  Chapter 11 - Tina

  Chapter 12 - James

  Chapter 13 - Tina

  Chapter 14 - James

  Chapter 15 - Tina

  Chapter 16 - James

  Chapter 17 - Tina

  Chapter 18 - James

  Chapter 19 - Tina and James

  The End

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  About the Authors

  Forever Fantasy Online

  Book 1 of 3

  By Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach

  It’s not a game anymore...

  In the real world, twenty-one-year-old library sciences student Tina Anderson is invisible and under-appreciated, but in the VR-game Forever Fantasy Online she's Roxxy—the respected leader and main tank of a top-tier raiding guild. Her brother, James Anderson, is a college drop-out struggling under debt, but in FFO he's famous—an explorer known all over the world for doing every quest and collecting the rarest items.

  Both Tina and James need the game more than they'd like to admit, but their favorite escape turns into a trap when FFO becomes real. Suddenly, wounds aren’t virtual, the stupid monsters have turned cunning, NPCs start acting like actual people, and death might be forever.

  In the real world, everyone said being good at video games was a waste of time. Now, separated across a much larger and more deadly world, their skill at FFO is the only thing keeping them alive. It’s going to take every bit of their expertise (and hoarded loot) to find each other and get back home, but as the harshness of their new reality sets in, Tina and James soon realize that being the best in the game might no longer be good enough.

  Content Warning

  A note from Rachel Aaron

  This a book about gamers. The characters talk like gamers, think like gamers, and act like gamers, which—as any gamer knows—is sometimes not very well. As such, this book will contain far more cursing, sexual situations, prejudice, and blood than my novels usually do.

  That said, it’s still us. Travis and I do not tolerate hate in our fiction any more than we do in real life. Just because a character says/does something awful does not mean that we agree with it, or that that person will not have to pay for their actions. This book deals with difficult issues many real people face, and we tried our best to give those issues the gravitas and realism they deserve. We might not have done everything perfectly, but Travis and I did our best to get it right.

  Forever Fantasy Online is our love letter to the online games we played obsessively for years. We wanted to show the amazing strength and resourcefulness of the gaming community without painting over its pitfalls. This book reflects that, and we hope that you love it as much as we do.

  Thank you for reading and enjoy the story!

  Chapter 1

  Tina

  Tina Anderson, aka Roxxy, aka guild leader and main tank of the Roughneck Raiders, aka the poor person in charge of tonight’s raid, was trying to drum up a few more seasoned fighters and not having much luck.

  “Where the fuck is everyone?”

  Tina propped her character’s elbow on the edge of her massive tower shield, scowling at the glowing menus. The game’s fully immersive VR engine made it look like they were floating right in front of her, rubbing the long list of grayed-out, offline names in her face. “We had eighty-five people begging for raid slots yesterday, but now that I need volunteers to help with tryout night, everyone’s mysteriously gone.” She glanced down at the deadly-looking elf wearing a killer’s suit of black-and-red armor beside her. “You got anyone?”

  SilentBlayde, her second-in-command and the only Roughneck who never missed a raid night, shook his head. “Sorry, Roxxy. It’s Golden Week here in Japan, and all of my friends are busy.”

  “Damn,” Tina said, pinching the bridge of her towering character’s stone nose. “Thanks for trying. I just can’t believe this bullshit. Look.”

  She waved her hand through the cluttered floating interface, bringing up her browser window showing the tryout-night sign-up sheet she’d posted on their guild forums over a week ago. “We had a full group lined up! Now that it’s actually go time, though, five people suddenly have connectivity issues, four are down with the flu, two have work emergencies, and Chris is claiming he’s got food poisoning for the third damn week in a row.”

  “Chris does eat a lot of weird stuff,” SilentBlayde hedged. “Maybe it’s just bad luck?”

  “It’s lies. That’s what it is,” Tina snarled. “I don’t know what’s worse, the shirking or the fact that they think I’m dumb enough to believe this crap.” Her eyes narrowed. “I should kick them all out.”

  “Hey, it’s only tryout night,” SB said, his slightly accented voice cajoling. “Let’s go in anyway! What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Are you crazy? We’re eleven short!” She pointed at the truncated raid list floating in the left of her heads-up interface. “If they were all Roughnecks, that wouldn’t be an issue, but these are newbies. I don’t even know what gear they’re wearing.” She sighed. “If we didn’t need new recruits so badly, I’d cancel the whole thing.”

  “Yeah,” SB said, the good humor draining from his voice. He knew as well as she did how many A-list players they’d lost over the last few months and what that meant for the guild. “It’s the stupid Once King fight,” he said bitterly. “It’s too hard.”

  “He’s the final boss,” Tina said with a shrug. “He’s supposed to be hard.”

  “Not that hard,” SilentBlayde said. “He’s a guild killer. His fight broke Six Ways from Raiding and Richard’s Inferno, and they were the top two raiding guilds in the world. People are starting to say that the Once King can’t be killed.”

  “Fuck that,” Tina said. “Why would they put a boss who can’t be killed in the game? If other guilds couldn’t handle it, that just means there’s room at the top. We are this close to figuring the Once King out. We got him to thirty percent last week. Just a little bit farther, and we’ll be the new number one!”

  Just thinking about that pumped her up. The Roughnecks had scored a world-first kill earlier this year, and it had been the best night of Tina’s life. But that was just the Blood General, a lesser dungeon-boss who was now on farm status for most of the top guilds. The Once King was different. He was the final boss of the Dead Mountain, the hardest raid dungeon Forever Fantasy Online had ever released. His fight was so famously unfair, even non-FFO gamers had heard about it. If Roxxy and her Roughnecks could kill him, they’d be legends.

  Assuming she could ever fill a raid again.

  Armored shoulders slumping, Tina shoved the browser window full of excuses, laziness, and lies to the far side of her interface so she could see her clock. 9:30p.m. She’d been trying to fill this group for two hours now. Two damn hours wasted playing the obnoxious Guild-master-game-of-bullshit-menus instead of Forever Fantasy Online, the most beautiful full-immersion VR game ever made. The game she’d played obsessively for the last seven years. The game she used
to love before it had turned into a weekly cycle of nagging and brow-beating a hundred players into acting like the hardcore raiders they claimed to be.

  “Hell with this,” Tina muttered, punching her gauntleted hand through the “Close All” command. The interface chimed when she touched it, and the sphere of guild-management menus, chat boxes, and windowed browser plug-ins surrounding her vanished to reveal the ancient flagstone road leading to the Dead Mountain.

  Even a year after release, the dungeon still looked damn impressive. Now that Tina’s vision was no longer cluttered with floating boxes, it really did feel like she was standing at the threshold of a dreadful mountain of death. The Once King’s stronghold rose from the dusty gray valley like a giant black thorn. There were no plants on its slopes, no life. Instead, the barren stone was stitched with battlements where skeleton archers, zombie hounds, and other undead roved in huge packs, their eyes glowing like ghostly blue-white candles.

  At the base of the mountain, where the broken road ended, a giant arched gate stood open in invitation, its four-stories-tall iron doors filled with the vortex of swirling purple magic that marked the entrance to the Dead Mountain raid dungeon. It was all beautifully detailed, a masterpiece of atmospheric game design, which only made it more obnoxious that the rest of the Once King’s zone was a whole lot of rolling gray nothing.

  Tina hated the Deadlands. Unlike FFO’s other zones, which were filled with beautiful elven forests, glowing volcanoes, and endless golden fields, the view here was gray, gray, and more gray. There were dead gray trees, gray roads, gray boulders, gray rocks, and fields of gray dirt spread out below a cloudy gray sky. Even the air smelled of ash and tasted like road grit, which was a total waste of FFO’s revolutionary Sensorium Engine technology. The game automatically muted sensory input that was deemed painful or unpleasant, so at least the dust that was constantly blowing into her eyes didn’t sting, but it was still ugly and depressing. Sometimes, Tina couldn’t believe she’d spent a year in this damned place. When she looked up at the pinprick of blue-white light shining from the Dead Mountain’s peak, though, it all came back. The Once King was up there, and she’d eat all the gray crap in the world if that was what it took to claim the prize of his defeat.

  Burning with renewed determination, Tina turned on her armored heel and marched down the road to address her raid, such as it was.

  A few dozen feet from where she and SB had been standing, thirty-seven players stood out from the gray landscape like neon stars. The glow of their enchanted weapons and armor transformed the Deadlands’ dusty air into a rainbow prism, and their wildly colored hair, hats, and vanity decorations showed no sign of the dirt that clung to everything else. But while they looked like an army of radiant gods, they acted like a bunch of bored teenagers.

  The players stood in small packs, some chatting, others dancing half-heartedly or fiddling with in-game toys. One group was sitting in the dirt with their weapons discarded around them, blatantly watching anime on a giant floating screen someone had projected into the shadow of a destroyed catapult. Tina couldn’t believe no one was complaining about such an immersion-breaking faux pas, but what else was there to do? All the other raiding guilds had long since gone ahead into their own private versions of the Dead Mountain dungeon, yet her crew was still standing around, doing nothing.

  Tina ran a metal-gauntleted hand over her character’s face. Everyone in front of her met the minimum requirements for the dungeon—she wouldn’t have invited them otherwise—but this was a shit group. Other than the pack of Roughnecks hanging out together in the back and a few regulars who weren’t in the guild but always came to Tina’s raids when she invited them, no one had end-game gear. Taking a raid like this into the hardest instance in the game was just begging for an ass kicking, but giving up meant another week without bringing any new blood into the guild, putting them even farther away from a Once King kill.

  That was too close to defeat for her to stomach. Gritting her teeth so hard she could feel the pressure in her real head beneath the VR helmet, Tina waved her arm for the raid announcement command. The second she finished the gesture, a gleaming silver megaphone appeared in her character’s fist. She was raising it to her mouth to order everyone into the mountain, ass kicking be damned, when she heard SB calling her name.

  Tina looked over her shoulder to see the elf running toward her, and she felt her real face again as a blush spread over her cheeks. Watching SilentBlayde move was one of her guilty pleasures. As an elven Assassin, his character model had fluid animations that the less graceful classes, even those played by elves, simply couldn’t match. She’d actually tried the combo herself back when she’d first gotten into FFO and had a pretty fun time.

  Then she’d made Roxxy.

  It had taken less than five levels before Tina was hooked. Her stonekin Knight was eight feet tall and seven hundred pounds of armored elemental fury. With granite for skin and copper for hair, Roxxy was striking rather than pretty as her elf had been, but Tina didn’t care. Playing her stonekin felt titanic. Even when the game’s Human Analogue Translation System made it feel as if she was walking on stilts inside her giant character, it was worth the inconvenience, because that size was power. Unlike her real-life self, people paid attention when Roxxy spoke, and Tina loved it. Even better, stonekin didn’t blush, which meant her character’s face at least was fine when she turned around.

  “Please tell me you’ve found eleven geared players to come and save us,” she said as SilentBlayde slid to a graceful stop beside her.

  “Not eleven, but I might have one,” he said, blue eyes shining above the ninja mask that covered the lower half of his face. “James just came online.”

  What little of Tina’s good mood watching SB had brought back evaporated at the mention of her brother’s name. “So?” she said sourly. “James never says yes when I invite him.”

  “He does sometimes, and he’s always top notch when he shows up.” SilentBlayde gave her a warm look. “Just try him. The worst that happens is he says no.”

  That was not the worst that could happen, but she wasn’t in a position to be picky, and they could use another healer. She was weighing the salvation of her raid against the emotional minefield that was spending time with her brother when the inside of her head began to ring.

  “Speak of the devil,” Tina said, glancing up at the corner of her vision, where a green phone icon was pulsing next to a picture of James’s tired face. “Hang on, SB. Looks like he’s calling me.”

  SilentBlayde stepped back politely, and Tina tapped the icon to pick up the call, trying her best to inject some enthusiasm into her voice as she said, “Hi, J. You logging in soon?”

  Her older brother’s reply spoke directly into her head. “Hi, T. Yeah, I’m on the character-selection screen right now.” She could hear the nostalgic FFO login music through his speakers as James’s voice took on a suspicious level of charm. “You want to ditch raiding for a night and come get something amazing with me?”

  Tina snorted. “Amazing like that stupid fire rabbit pet you spent twelve hours grinding for last Saturday?”

  “Hey, that drop normally takes a year to get!” James said defensively. “And I did it in eleven hours because I saved up all those luck potions from the April Fools’ Day event. But forget the fire rabbit. I found something way cooler. Get this: there’s a place in the Verdancy where the game developers are building part of the next expansion. We can sneak inside if we wall-walk just right, and—this is the best part—it says on the internet there’s an active quest giver who awards some kind of giant-lizard mount! Wouldn’t it be cool to be two of the only people in the world riding it?”

  “Sounds like asking for the ban hammer to me,” Tina said, glancing at her wilting raid. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you come raid with me for once? We’re short for the Dead Mountain. If you help us out, I’ll guarantee you one piece of loot if we kill anything.”

  “Thanks,” James said, th
e excitement draining from his voice, “but I’ll pass.”

  “I can’t believe you’re turning down free loot,” Tina said angrily. She was being dangerously generous bribing him like that, and she knew that he knew it.

  “Dying all night is not free,” James countered. “And it’s not fun, either. I appreciate the offer, but I just want to kick back and explore tonight, not slave away in a raid.”

  “No, I get it,” Tina said. “You’re good for messing around with some buggy wall walking but not for helping me.”

  Her brother heaved a long sigh. “Tina, this is a game. It’s not supposed to be work. I’m already working three jobs to pay my student loans. More hard stuff is not what I want right now.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Tina snapped. “If you’d finished college instead of slacking off for five years, maybe you wouldn’t have to work three jobs.”

  “Tina—”

  “Don’t ‘Tina’ me,” she said, probably sharper than she should have, but she couldn’t help it. As always, her brother’s complaining pissed her off more than anything else ever could. “That’s your entire problem! You never want to do the hard work. I had to pay for college all by myself, but I’m leading a world-first raiding guild and on track to graduate on time because I’m not lazy.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Whatever you need to tell yourself,” Tina said with a sneer. “I knew you wouldn’t come. You always flake out when I need you. Have fun doing your bullshit alone.”

  James started to sputter more excuses, but Tina had already jabbed her finger into the silver X, closing the voice chat. She was still fuming when she noticed the concerned look SB was shooting her from above his ninja mask.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just…that was a little harsh. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s why I didn’t want to talk to him!” Tina cried. “It royally pisses me off. He’s one of the best healers in the game, yet he wastes all of his time on meaningless crap. It’s the story of his life. I’d feel almost sorry for him if it wasn’t also the story of my life due to all the shit I’ve had to go through because of him!”