Periapt [Survival in the world of a Cursed CRPG, Progression, Crafting, LitRPG]

Royle plucked the buckoo birds while Hollis, Dakota, and Otis used all their strength to harvest the meat of the cedar elk. It wasn’t wood all the way through. It was red, gamey-looking meat, but there was a lot of it.

“Good for chili,” Otis said once they had finally gotten down to it.

“You know you say that about every meat that’s a shade darker than light pink,” Dakota said. “We could get a pristine fatty salmon, and you would want to put it in chili.”

Otis neither confirmed nor denied it. He didn’t talk a lot.

Dakota was sitting back, honing a knife slowly, using an ability he had bargained for long ago. The metal was thinning on its own, with burrs sloughing off until the knife was so sharp it could cut right through the wooden armor of the creature. Hollis would need to ask him about that trick.

He worked until his fingers were numb. He really wanted to pull his weight, being new and all.

“I’ve been thinking about your cereal boxes,” Royle said, speaking up over Dakota. “I know a lot of people who said they found the game that way, but not recently. Most people who came around my time found the game second-hand. Probably from someone who already got beamed away to Periapt. It’s weird that they were still in cereal boxes after all these years. I’m just saying.”

Hollis understood what he was being asked.

He nodded and backed away from the carcass.

“There are collectors who buy boxes of cereal for the sole purpose of sitting on them until they get valuable enough to resell. Some have big collections. When they die, their families might throw out the boxes, sure, but most try to sell them off quickly. That’s where I got mine.” He wiped blood off his fingers while Dakota took his place to start cutting away at the meat.

“So you’re telling me that you collect cereal boxes and you just happened to find one with Return to Periapt inside,” Royle said as he shoved a handful of feathers into a bag. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad luck.”

“I’d say it was good,” Hollis said. “Seeing as I was looking for a copy.” He took a breath and chose his words as best he could. He worried that talk of home might stir up old feelings. “While you were gone, Return to Periapt developed its own kind of following online. Most people thought it was a meme. But some people’s reports of playing the game struck me as true. A lot of them said they found it in a cereal box, so that’s how I knew to look there.”

Dakota stopped his work and jutted upward. “Wait a second, how many people said no?”

“A fair number,” Hollis answered.

Dakota stepped toward him. “So people know. They know about us, right? Where we went?”

Hollis saw a vulnerability in the man’s eyes. He hated to deliver the bad news.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know how many went missing, but the police didn’t check what video game they played last. As far as I know, knowledge of where everyone went never went beyond a joke on the internet. Only those of us who had played the game before and turned down the oath knew the truth.”

Dakota’s eyes glazed over for a moment. He stood there, biting his upper lip, completely deflated.

“You gonna work?” Otis growled. The mountain man was ignoring the conversation.

Dakota shook his head and then dropped back down and started butchering once more.

“You said those of us,” Royle said. “So you played the game before, huh?”

Hollis nodded. “When I was a kid.”

Royle whistled. “So you turned down the oath, only to come back and try again. I tell ya, I didn’t have it in me to turn it down. All I knew was that you got one world where you have magic powers and another without. Easy choice for me. Easy choice.”

He laughed at the thought of it.

Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

They continued butchering until they had the beast skinned, trimmed, and packaged for transport. They took as much as they could carry, but the creature was too large for them to take all of it.

“All gone tomorrow,” Otis said as he stood up.

Hollis looked at what remained of the creature. They had left the parts that were of least use. The denizens of the forest would make their own use of them.

Hollis had strapped the creature’s antlers to his back. If he could figure out how they worked, the possibilities would be exciting.

“You know,” Royle said as he rode upon his horse Jaq, who was now strapped down with their catch. “I always wonder what happened to people who turned down the oath.”

“You keep playing until you die,” Hollis said. “Scary time. Not knowing if it was better to get it over with or to keep trying. Not knowing if the game would ever let you go. Lasted a while. Then, I got stripped for parts by one of those cougars with the magic scream, and the CD melted, so I could never come back.”

They moved in silence for a few minutes.

“Was dying as painful as the rest of the game?” Royle asked.

“It wasn’t fun,” Hollis said, rubbing the place on his neck where the cougar from the computer game had ripped out his character’s throat. “Not looking to repeat it.”

Dakota hadn’t said a word since they had left back the way they came toward the canyon.

He managed to pipe up.

“I still don’t know what you people are talking about with all that,” he said. “I never noticed anything about no phantom pains or the funny sounds either. I must have finished the tutorial too quick. That’s just my luck.”

Hollis thought about that for a moment.

“So you didn’t ever stop playing the game long enough to realize you could never really leave?” he asked.

“Shoot, no,” Dakota said. “I had the house to myself, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd with a week’s worth of Mountain Dew and Red Bull. I never heard a thing, and if I got injured, I sure didn’t feel it. Must not have gotten hit too much. Like I said, if that stuff was happening to me, you bet your last dollar I would never have agreed to come here. I was just playing the game, and suddenly I was being pulled out of a boat in my underwear.”

Dakota had told that story before. Hollis tried to imagine the shock that might have been. The first time he had shut off the game, only to still hear the campfire crackling and the townsfolk passing by, it had scared him half to death.

It hadn’t scared him away, though.

“Well, you must have been a lot better at the game than me,” Hollis said. “I wandered around in there for weeks, jumping at every shadow.”

“Heck,” Dakota said. “I probably did it all in a few days. Maybe a single weekend.”

“It’s odd,” Hollis said. “Feeling the world, hearing the sounds... that was a big part of why I wanted to come to Periapt in the first place. It was so easy for this world to feel more real than Earth ever did.”

“So why’d you turn the oath down?” Royle asked.

“Talked myself out of it,” Hollis said. That was as far as the conversation went.

The men made their way back to the canyon homestead, ready to present their haul to the many people under their protection.

Hollis, though, his mind drifted back to when he was younger, when he had first learned of Periapt.

~-~

Reflections Part One

The year was 2003. Hollis Hood was thirteen years old, a freshman in high school, and the bus was just about to leave without him.

He hid behind a row of metal trash cans on his hands and knees, watching for when the coast was clear. Miss Ruby, the bus driver, was waiting longer than he expected. She was a nice lady, but then, everyone had been nice to him lately.

He almost felt bad about skipping school. He had always been a good student and a good kid. None of that had gotten him attention or adoration, but when his popular older brother died, he got a taste of what Spencer must have felt every day.

People loved Spence. He was the golden boy. The only person who was ever nice to Hollis was Miss Ruby, and she was nice to everybody.

The bus doors closed, and soon it started pulling away.

Hollis could focus on only one thing. The thing that made him forget about Spencer, if only for a moment. It was Periapt, a world Hollis alone knew about.

He crawled out from around the trash cans and climbed a stack of old bricks over his neighbor’s side of the fence to get into his family’s backyard. The gate was too loud. Hollis needed to be quiet.

He landed on the ground with a gentle thud and proceeded to sneak over to the downstairs bathroom window, which he had left unlocked.

It was easy enough to open with his palm, and he was back inside in a flash. All he had to do was dodge his mother as he found his way back upstairs to the computer room that had once been his dad’s office.

He was as quiet as he could be, but when he saw his mother fast asleep on the couch, he felt foolish for all the sneaking and trickery. His mother, Debbie, wasn’t on the lookout. She wasn’t patrolling or making sure he made it to school. She was sleeping. All of his evasion had been for nothing.

He walked up the stairs and didn’t even try to be quiet. His mother never made a noise louder than a snore. There was a time when she would be posted by the window, watching from a distance as the school bus took him away. That felt forever ago. Hollis wondered if it was always Spencer she had been watching, and Hollis was just standing next to him.

The thought nearly sent him to tears, but his next thought saved him: he had all day to play Return to Periapt.

He locked himself in the room with a day's supply of snacks and root beer and powered on the computer.

There was a world where he was needed. Earth would have to wait.