The Player Blackout Read online

  “You would be surprised at what motivates people to play Capes Online,” said Chuck idly. “In any case, I agree that I doubt any criminals from your past life are behind this. Do you have other enemies that you might have earned from elsewhere?”

  I frowned and furrowed my brow, thinking hard. “No. I can’t think of anyone else. I had a few bullies in high school, but we’ve all grown out of that and now they’re some of my best friends. I also have some exes, but none of them are that crazy.”

  “A leaker from within the Department, then,” said Chuck. He tapped one finger on the air several times, like he was typing on a keyboard I couldn’t see. “I will report this to Director Johnson and advise him to start an investigation into the identity of the leaker. Don’t worry, Nyle. We’ll have this figured out before you level up.”

  Surprised, I said, “Uh, that’s awfully nice of you, Chuck, but I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary. After all, even if someone in-game is trying to kill me, it’s not like they can actually murder me. I can respawn, after all.”

  Chuck looked at me with a deadly serious expression. “I think you do not understand the implications of your report, Nyle. If someone in the Department is leaking out the real identities of Project Second Life participants to outside parties, then Project Second Life’s security is at risk. If there is a leaker, as we suspect, then we must root him out and ensure he does not leak anything even more important out into the world, such as the existence of Project Second Life itself.”

  “We don’t know the leaker’s gender, though,” I said. “Could it be a woman?”

  “My apologies,” said Chuck with a bow. “I was simply speaking in general. But yes, at this rate the leaker could be anyone. I will ensure that the investigation starts as soon as possible. In the meantime, I would suggest keeping up your guard and growing eyes on the back of your head.”

  “I don’t think I’ll need to do that,” I said. “I’ve got Cy. He can keep an eye out for me.”

  “It is still prudent to take your own security into your own hands,” Chuck advised. “Not to disparage your Sidekick, but the attempted assassination did happen while your Sidekick was with you, did it not?”

  “Right,” I said, nodding. “I need to practice situational awareness, then. Not a problem. I leaned that in the police academy.”

  “Then take what you learned in the academy and apply it to this game,” Chuck said. “Capes Online may be a game, Nyle, but as you’ve no doubt learned by now, it is a very realistic game.”

  I smiled sheepishly when he said that. “Too realistic for my comfort, honestly. I kind of like the old games where you could eat a mushroom and become big and jump on turtles. Not realistic in the slightest, but also a lot less stressful.”

  “Well, I would suggest leveling up your character some more,” said Chuck. “Making yourself stronger will make it harder for people to kill you. Perhaps complete a few missions to get some experience and Stat Points.”

  “Good idea,” I said. I yawned. “I’ll do that tomorrow. I’m pooped.”

  “Then I will let you rest,” said Chuck. He yawned as well. “I wish I could sleep as well, but after hearing your report about the leaker, it looks like I am going to pull another all-nighter. Oh, well. That’s how I got through college.”

  With that, Chuck disappeared from my sight. With another yawn, I laid down on my bed and pulled my blankets over me. But even though I closed my eyes, I didn’t go to sleep just yet.

  Part of me was worried that if I went to sleep, the Assassin might kill me in my sleep. I know Cy said that no one could enter my Base without my permission, but if someone was willing to try to kill me in the middle of a crowded street in front of dozens, if not hundreds, of witnesses, then I could easily see that same person trying to break into my Base to kill me when I was most vulnerable.

  Even if I survived the night, though, they might still come after me tomorrow. I got lucky this time with that Recover girl coming to my rescue, but there was no guarantee that I would be that lucky again. Lightning never struck twice, after all.

  I’d have to do what Chuck suggested and start leveling up my character. I’d also need to go through and assign my Stat and Power Points as well.

  For now, though, I would try to get a good night’s sleep and hope I woke up alive tomorrow morning.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Luckily, I woke up the next morning without my throat slit or anything like that. I actually slept really well, far better than I did in real life, and when I woke up, I got a notification that read:

  Buff added: Well-rested. After a good night’s sleep, you feel like you can take on the world! +10% to all EXP gained and +10% Stamina for the next 8 hours!

  Nice. That would definitely make it easier to level up my character today.

  First things first, though. I needed to distribute the Stat and Power Points I already had, so I pulled up my character sheet to analyze my current stat spread:

  Secret Identity: Winter

  Real Identity: Nyle Ash Maxwell

  Level: 2

  EXP: 50/200 (150 EXP to the next level)

  Available Stat Points: 4

  Available Power Points: 2

  Alignment: Hero

  Class: Fighter

  Reputation: Unknown

  Powers: Super Strength [Level 1], Ice Beam [Level 1]

  Skills: Scan [Level 1], Dodge [Level 1]

  Equipment: Ice Man Costume [Powers: 1/5]

  Health: 20

  Stamina: 15

  Strength: 20

  Defense: 12

  Charisma: 5

  Intelligence: 11

  Agility: 18

  Evasion: 6

  Accuracy: 10

  Dexterity: 17

  Energy: 10

  Luck: 1

  HERO STATS

  Courage: 10

  Justice: 11

  Trust: 5

  Fame: 0

  Willpower: 9

  Hmm. I had 4 Stat Points and 2 Power Points available. It was tough to decide what Stats to increase and which ones to leave as is. I thought about how unlucky I was to get taken by surprise like that. It sure would be nice to have some more luck, so I tried putting my Stat Points into Luck, only to get this error message:

  ERROR: Luck cannot be increased except with Luck Points.

  Luck Points? What the heck was that? I would have to ask Cy about it later when he got up. I dismissed the error message and looked at my other Stats, stroking my chin as I thought about what Stats would be best for me.

  Back when I played the original Capes Online, I had put all of my Stat Points into Strength under the impression that more Strength was always a good thing. Problem was, of course, that it didn’t make my character’s Powers any stronger and forced me to rely on melee fighting, which my character back then wasn’t really good for.

  It seemed to me that my character, even now, still wasn’t good at melee fighting. I recalled my fight with the ninjas and realized that the main reason I won the fight was due to Ice Beam. I distinctly recalled how Ice Beam’s 5 Energy requirement left me vulnerable due to how low my Energy level was.

  Therefore, I tossed all four Stat Points into Energy, bringing it up to a total of 14. That still left me with only two uses of Ice Beam before I ran out, but the way I saw it, it would be easier and faster for my Energy to regenerate if I had a little bit left rather than none at all. Besides, there were other Powers I could learn how to use, Powers which might use less Energy than Ice Beam, although it would probably be a while before I learned how to use them.

  With that out of the way, I decided to do the next logical thing and throw my two Power Points into Ice Beam. That meant Ice Beam was now eight Power Points away from Level 2, which made me eager to see how it would much stronger it would become once it leveled up.

  I had no Hero Points to distribute to my Hero Stats, but I figured I would get some today after I completed a few missions. Maybe I needed to stop a bank rob
bery or something.

  Here’s what my character sheet looked like after all of that:

  Secret Identity: Winter

  Real Identity: Nyle Ash Maxwell

  Level: 2

  EXP: 50/200 (150 EXP to the next level)

  Available Stat Points: 0

  Available Power Points: 0

  Alignment: Hero

  Class: Fighter

  Reputation: Unknown

  Powers: Super Strength [Level 1], Ice Beam [Level 1. Next Level: 8 PP]

  Skills: Scan [Level 1], Dodge [Level 1]

  Equipment: Ice Man Costume [Powers: 1/5]

  Health: 20

  Stamina: 15

  Strength: 20

  Defense: 12

  Charisma: 5

  Intelligence: 11

  Agility: 18

  Evasion: 6

  Accuracy: 10

  Dexterity: 17

  Energy: 14

  Luck: 1

  HERO STATS

  Courage: 10

  Justice: 11

  Trust: 5

  Fame: 0

  Willpower: 9

  Satisfied with my distribution, I closed the character screen and hopped out of bed. “Cy! Wake up! We’re going mission-hunting today! After breakfast, of course.”

  -

  “Man, that was good stuff,” said Cy as we walked out of a small local diner called Joe’s Bacon & and Eggs, rubbing his stomach. “Always love this place. Good, cheap food.”

  I also felt really good. Cy had suggested the place when I wondered where we were going to get breakfast. As it turned out, even though this was a video game, characters still needed to eat, including players. If a character went too long without eating, they got the Hunger debuff, which reduced Stamina by one percent every hour. If you went even longer without eating, you could also get the Starvation debuff, which resulted in a fifty percent decrease in all Stats except for Hero Stats. It was pretty clear to me that the game designers wanted to make sure players didn’t go long without eating, which was fine by me. I would probably eat even without the threat of a major Stat debuff, because eating was a reminder of my past life and made me feel like I was still a real person.

  As I swiped away the notification informing me that I now had the Full Stomach buff—which granted an extra 10% buff to Stamina for four hours—I said, “I know, but we’re still low on money. I don’t know if we’ll even be able to afford lunch at this point. That’s why we need to complete some missions.”

  “Really?” said Cy. He clapped his hands excitedly. “Finally! I was wondering when we’d start looking for missions. I thought we’d never get to the fun stuff.”

  “We’re not doing this for fun,” I said as we stopped at a stoplight, waiting for the dizzyingly fast traffic to pass before we crossed the street. “We’re doing this because of what happened yesterday. I don’t want to be defenseless again.”

  “Oh,” said Cy, his shoulders slumping. “Right. I almost forgot about the fact that you nearly got poisoned to death in public.”

  I looked at Cy in bewilderment. “How can you possibly forget something like that?”

  Cy shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it didn’t happen to me and you survived, so I didn’t see any reason to worry. Why? Should I be worried?”

  I shook my head as the stop light turned red and we began crossing the street. “Never mind. Where do I go if I want to find a mission?”

  Cy stroked his chin. “Well, the best way to find a mission is to talk to random Civilians, but with your Trust stat so low and your Fame even lower, I think it will be harder for you to convince random Civilians to give you a mission. You’re also not terribly Charismatic, either.”

  “Thanks,” I said deadpan as we stopped beside a trash can. I looked at the random Civilians all around us, but none of them paid us any attention. I guess Heroes weren’t really a big deal in a city where millions existed. “So do I just walk up to a random Civilian and ask them how I can help or—”

  “Help!” a young girl’s voice cried out all of a sudden. “Someone, please help me!”

  “That’s a good sign someone needs help,” said Cy, but I ignored him as I looked for the girl, my head whipping back and forth as I tried to find her.

  It wasn’t hard. I saw a young girl—she couldn’t have been older than six—standing underneath a nearby tree built into the street. She wore a frilly pink dress and had short blonde hair done in pigtails. I didn’t see her parents or any adults with her, but she didn’t look lost. Instead, she was looking up at the tree, biting her fingernails as she looked at whatever was making her anxious.

  “Hey, kid,” I said as Cy and I approached her. “What seems to be the problem?”

  The girl looked up at me, the nametag [CIVILIAN HANNAH] floating above her head. “Are you a Hero, mister?”

  I nodded. “Yes. My name is Winter.”

  “Winter?” the girl said, tilting her head to the side. “That’s a lame name.”

  “Did your parents teach you that it’s not polite to say things like that to complete strangers?” I asked, doing my best not to lose my temper. I liked kids well enough, but I wasn’t tolerant of kids who were behaved in such blatantly disrespectful ways.

  “No,” said Hannah simply. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. I need a Hero more than anything right now and you look like you could help me.”

  Hannah’s behavior was irritating, but I decided not to press my luck. If she had a mission for me, then I couldn’t afford to annoy her and make her look for the help of some other Hero. “Fine. What seems to be the problem?”

  Hannah immediately pointed up at the tree. “My cat, Felix, is stuck in this tree and he can’t get down.”

  As soon as Hannah said that, I heard a small mewing sound above and looked up into the tree to see a fat calico cat sitting on one of the higher branches. He was an absolutely huge cat, so big that I wondered how he could have possibly gotten up there in the first place. He looked too fat to walk, much less to climb up a tree, but I guess cats could do anything when they put their minds to it. Felix looked down upon me with bored eyes, his tail swishing back and forth like a snake.

  “That’s all you need me to do?” I said, looking down at Hannah again.

  “Yes,” said Hannah. “Can you please get Felix down from the tree for me? Please?”

  When Hannah said that, a notification popped up in front of me:

  [CIVILIAN HANNAH] has offered you a mission!

  MISSION: Get Felix the cat safely down from this tree

  Felix the cat, who is also very fat, has gotten stuck up a tree, poor thing. Whether due to sheer laziness, a fear of heights, or a desire to troll humans, Felix can’t get down without your assistance.

  Help poor Felix get down from the tree or Hannah will probably start crying. You don’t want want to make a cute little girl cry in public in front of everyone, do you?

  ALIGNMENT: Hero (+1% in Hero Alignment)

  DIFFICULTY: Easy

  RARITY: Common

  SUCCESS: Get Felix the cat safely down from the tree and back into the arms of his owner

  FAILURE: Walk away and bear the stigma of making a little girl cry in public, you jerk

  REWARDS: +1 Trust and +1 Fame, plus the eternal gratitude of Hannah

  ACCEPT? Y/N

  Huh. I had hoped that my first official mission as a Hero would be something a bit more exciting like thwarting a bank robbery or even returning a lady’s stolen purse, but I guess we all got to start somewhere. Plus, getting an increase in my Trust and Fame would make it easier to get access to rarer missions, so I hit ‘Y’ to accept the mission.

  It couldn’t be that difficult, right? It would take me probably less than ten minutes to get fat Felix out of the tree and then I could move on to my next mission. Easy as pie.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As it turned out, Felix the cat did not actually want to be saved.

  First off, my Powers didn’t really lend themselves well to thi
s kind of mission. With Super Strength, I could have uprooted the tree and shook Felix out of it, but something told me that that would probably cause me to fail the mission. Ice Beam wasn’t much useful, because the point of the mission was to save the cat, not freeze it.

  So I decided to try climbing the tree. Seemed like it should be easy enough. I spent my childhood climbing the trees on my grandfather’s ranch in East Texas. And I had made sure to stay in shape going into my adult years, so climbing trees came as naturally to me as walking. Cy offered to help me, but I told him I could handle this myself.

  That turned out to be a big mistake. When I got within arm’s reach of Felix—who had watched me climb the tree very carefully—Felix suddenly lashed out with a claw and slashed my hand open.

  Surprised by the pain, I accidentally let go of the tree and fell backward onto the sidewalk. I landed flat on my back and gasped as a notification appeared in my vision:

  [Cat Felix] slashed you! -1 Health!

  Debuff: Bleeding Wound. Your hand has been cut right open by Felix’s deadly claws. Though you will not lose any Health, your Dexterity has decreased by 1%. Duration: 5 minutes.

  “What the heck?” I said.

  “Boss!” said Cy, gesturing frantically at Hannah. “Ex-nay on the swear-nay around the girlsnay!”

  “It’s okay,” said Hannah with the sweetest smile ever. “My daddy says a lot worse things than that whenever he hurts himself. Yesterday when he was hammering a nail in he hit his thumb and said—”

  “Got it,” I said as I sat up. I looked at my bleeding hand and grimaced. It wasn’t a particularly deep cut, but pain flared whenever I closed my fist or moved my fingers. I realized that my lowered Dexterity would probably make it harder to climb the tree, which made a lot of sense when you thought about it, but it also made my mission a lot harder than it should be.

  “Sorry about Felix,” said Hannah, folding her hands behind her back. “He doesn’t like strangers. He doesn’t know you’re just trying to help. Right, Felix?”

  Felix, of course, did not respond, but I could tell based on his expression that he knew exactly who I was and what I was trying to do. Even though Felix was just an AI-generated NPC, he acted so much like a real cat that I almost believed he really was a cat put inside this game like us.