A Gamer's Guide To Beating The Tutorial

They went down a street. The shutters of all the houses were drawn, the stern gazes of their guard companions keeping people from doing much of anything.

“Five inhabitants, two infected,” Kitty said, pointing to a house. Dipping his brush in blue dye, Jarne smeared two vertical lines atop the doorpost. They moved onto the next house. “Three inhabitants, three infected.” Jarne dipped the brush and painted one large stripe horizontally across the post. They continued. Kitty stopped. “This one…” He glanced back at Jarne. “It’s, um… Empty. Nobody in there.”

Jarne shugged. “Let’s move on, then. No use in sticking around. We’re on a really tight time limit, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kitty said. As they moved onto the next house, the guards behind them pulled one of five massive carts closer, two guards lobbying down one of the many sacks of rations, leaving it on the doorstep of the receiver before knocking. Of course, they didn’t stay until the resident opened the door. They didn’t want to die, after all. Still…

“So far, there’s only been three healthy houses,” Jarne said, mostly to himself. “How are these people supposed to totally quarantine if nobody’s allowed to leave their house? This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m sure Moleman knows what he’s doing,” Kitty said in his innocent, boyish way. Always so certain. “Also, that’s four healthy houses. Everyone in this one is a-okay.” Saying so, Kitty pointed a thumb at a nearby house, triumphant.

Jarne honestly didn’t care. “Whatever.”

They continued.

“Seven inhabitants, two infected.”

“Three inhabitants, one infected.”

“Four inhabitants, four infected.”

“Two goblins, one infected.”

“Seven goblins, six infected.”

“Five gobs, three blue.”

“Eleven gobs, ten blue.”

On and on and on and on. Paint, paint, paint, paint, pain, pain, pain. And they were only halfway done with the first block! They still had over six hours left to work, and Jarne was already considering drowning himself in his paint bucket. The only interesting thing that happened was when they encountered a suspicious-looking person out and about, who obviously got tackled by the guards and promptly dragged off to prison or the gallows or whatever. That, and another time when Kitty paused at a certain house.

“You know, Kitty…” Jarne said. “You’ve been sniffing for like a minute straight. We need to go.”

“One of the raiders is in here,” Kitty said. “You know, from the… When Plus died?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Moleman told me to note the houses, but that was only for the nobles… Hmmm, this is a conundrum…”

Jarne stared at him. Then, deadpan, he turned to look at the several dozen guards following them. He recalled the name of one of them. “Hello, Brenn? There be a crime-maker in there. Please jail.” Alright, so his goblinese could stand some improvement. But it got the job done. Brenn, after consulting his coworkers about what Jarne meant, brought a few of them inside the house, and then emerged with the criminal in tow. Easy.

Jarne turned back to Kitty.

Kitty was staring at him, his eyes brimming with awe and his mouth slacked open. “Are… are you… A God…?”

“I’m not,” Jarne said, “and that’s blasphemy.” A word Kitty clearly didn’t know. “Ugh, whatever. Let’s just continue, okay?”

“Y—yessir, Rat, sir!”

“Don’t call me that. Please.”

Luckily for his future neck-having, Kitty didn’t call Jarne anything like that for the entire rest of the day. As per his prediction, very few of the houses were fully healthy. He kept a tally, simply to keep himself entertained, and all and all, only 16,3% of all houses in the entire city were entirely healthy. 20,1% were completely sick, and 12,8% were… ‘empty.’

Shamefully enough, it took Jarne almost half the day to realize what Kitty meant when he said a house was empty. It wasn’t that nobody lived in it, as Jarne’s first assumption had been, but rather that, well… Nobody lived inside it. Had Jarne been a twinge more pessimistic, he might have assumed that Kitty was trying to cover up the fact that some houses were dead. At the point when he reached this semi-logical conclusion, Jarne’s processes were stopped by a single thought—’Why the hell would he do that?’

With no answer to such a simple question, Jarne decided to throw aside the entire idea.

Of all the houses they were to check, they had to save the manors for last. This was so that the nobles and blue-bloods wouldn’t have to cancel any of their plans to comply with the scheduled check. Because, obviously, the convenience of a bunch of hoarders was worth the added three hours workload. As if the guards hadn’t had to cart around the rations for seven hours already, not including lunch and rest breaks.

It was eight in the evening when they arrived at the first manor.

“How many?” Jarne asked, stepping up to the door post. He sighed inwardly. “It’s not like we’re counting the servants, but these assholes still keep their entire damn extended family in one place. It’s like they want to catch the plague…”

He felt a knot of sticks fall on his shoulder, bony and cold. When he turned to brush them off, he instead found Kitty’s hand on his shoulder. If he hadn’t been held in place, he was pretty sure he would have leapt a foot in the air.

Kitty frowned at him. “Moleman gave me special instructions for the judges. For one, we can’t mark the doorposts. Looks bad for them. Secondly, we have to actually talk to them to tell them what’s going on, how many are sick, and even who and how far gone they are. And, finally, if any are sick, he’s told me to tell them they’ll have priority on any donations.”

“Wow,” Jarne said. “I never knew Mole could kiss ass like that.”

“Well…” Kitty smiled. “It’s a good way of getting access to their homes. That means we can investigate properly, right?”

“Investigate? You mean—”

“You distract them,” Kitty said, “and I’ll sneak around. Sounds good?”

In a matter of mere seconds, Jarne’s entire mental image of Kitty was completely torn down and rebuilt, the cornerstone of the new foundation being one simple little thought: ‘Whoa. Kitty has a brain?’

“Everything okay?” Kitty asked. “You’ve been blanking out for like, almost ten seconds. We kind of need to—”

“Huh? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yes. Absolutely. I’ll distract them, and you get the stuff. Perfect.” He paused. A nagging question chiseled its way into his head. “I just… Why suspect the nobles? It was just a raid. A riot that went out of hand. Just today, we’ve had at least three dozen raiders arrested. None of them had any connection to the nobles.”

“It’s the guards,” Kitty said, stepping closer to the manor gates, his back turned to Jarne. “They were gone, and we still can’t find them. Most likely, in return for their silence and weaponry, they and their families were smuggled out of the city. They aren’t dead. Not to mention the fact that the riot itself… It showed up out of nowhere, two days before the quarantine, in the middle of the night. Someone had to be organizing it. Someone with enough power and influence to pull together a full crowd, bribe guards, hand out swords, and who had more to lose than just their lives if the quarantine went through.” Now, Kitty turned around, his back lit by the manor’s lights. “Hence, the nobles.” He smiled. “We just have to find out which houses, and then we can bring them to justice.”

A chill crossed Jarne’s back. He hadn’t considered any of that. Gulping, he straightened out.

With a peculiar smile, Kitty headed towards the manor, and Jarne, despite his unease, followed.

Of the seventeen major noble houses of the city, all of them had something criminal hidden. Smuggling, bribery, assassination, larceny, tax fraud, extortion… They were completely corrupt, something that stopped being funny by the fifth house.

They were also sick as dogs. All seventeen had at least one infected individual, with fifteen having at least three, and nine of them being fully infected from head to thrall. All of them were enraged to hear the news. They demanded private visits, donations, and letters of condolence from Mole. Jarne, unhappily, could promise them nothing. But he still had to stall for time, so he spent the majority of his visit rambling about possible future ways that they may or may not receive assistance that may or may not be amazing and could within some possible scenarios lead to the complete curing of everyone and their aunt, and that vase looked lovely, where had they gotten it?

And then Kitty would return, poke his arm, and Jarne would excuse himself, and off they went.

“How about these guys?”

“Mainly smuggling, but they also blackmailed the last mayor.”

“Same as everyone else, then.”

“Pretty much.”

“And what about…?”

“No, they were unrelated to the raid. They didn’t have any letters exchanged with the house of Dagrun, aside from one four years ago where they went no-contact over a bad marriage, so they probably don’t have anything to do with things.”

“Eleven houses, and only one of them has any involvement…”

“I’m sure we’ll find at least one or two more.” Kitty patted him on the back. “We’ll get justice for Plus. Don’t you worry.”

“Yeah. Alright,” Jarne said, but he didn’t really feel it. Plus wouldn’t have wanted this kind of justice. Whoever did this to him had either been killed or left unconscious in the cellar to be arrested in the morning. They had already been brought to justice. What was the use in trying to catch everyone who so much as stepped foot on the premises?

All Jarne could hope for was that Mole, in his search for justice, wouldn’t accidentally find revenge instead.