Heather the Necromancer

“No.” click. “No.” click “No.” click “NO!” Heather leaned back on the stairs of the crypt and put an arm over her eyes.

“Why do all the women's clothing leave so much exposed?” she cried to no one in particular. She looked down and clicked the next image and saw an outfit that was little more than a belt with a silk loincloth and a scarf of purple that just happened to drape over her chest.

“What if the wind blows!” she shouted at the image. “You won’t have anything on but your shame!”

“What are you doing?” Frank asked as he arrived at the top of the steps.

Heather sighed and held up her panel. “Looking for something to wear! Whoever designed these outfits clearly didn't think women should be dressed.”

“I think women designed those,” he said.

“What!” Heather snapped. “What woman wants to run around with everything but her shoulders and her ankles exposed?”

“Lot's of them,” Frank said. “One of the mundane classes is a tailor, and you can design clothing for players. That's where most of what you’re looking at comes from.”

Heather looked down at her panel and frowned. “So all this was designed by players?”

Frank nodded, and Heather scowled.

“I bet every one of them is a man!”

“I know some of the women were men,” Frank said.

“What?” Heather snapped again as she sat up.

“You can pick your gender, remember?”

Heather remembered the earlier conversation and thought it through.

“So, the women who design these outfits might once have been men?”

“Some of them are for sure,” Frank said as he scratched his head.

“My point still stands then!”

“There should be a way to pick the game defaults,” he said. “Those are the outfits the visitors added.”

Heather had to hunt for the option but eventually found the basic outfits. Sadly her sundress was among them.”

“I can't believe people think this outfit is bad because it covers,” she sighed.

“What outfit?” Frank asked as he shuffled down the stairs.

“The sundress I had on. Those three jerks made fun of me for wearing it.”

“I thought it looked old fashioned, but it was pretty on you,” Frank said.

She looked up at him with a slight smile. “At least somebody has an appreciation for simple style.”

“So what are you searching for?”

“Something I can wear to the city without going as a streaker,” she said.

“You want to go to the city?”

Heather smiled. “I want to see what it’s like. I won’t be gone long.”

“The city is three days away.”

“What!” she snapped for the third time. “You didn’t tell me that before!”

“I didn't think it mattered,” he said with a shrug.

“You were going to let me walk off to the city yesterday. I would be out there alone and lost. I would probably have been eaten by Nillacs.”

“I would have gone with you,” he said.

She paused to look into his yellow eyes.

“You? You would have?”

“Just as far as the forest outside the city. You can see it from there, and you would be safe on your own.”

“You would have protected me all the way there?”

“I suppose.”

“But, your graveyard?” she said. “You don’t like to be away from it too long. What if somebody did that thing to it?”

“Griefed it,” he reminded.

“Yes, that!”

“I would rebuild it, I guess.”

“But you get experience so slowly. Wouldn't that set you back?”

He scratched at his head again as he shrugged. “A little, I suppose, but you would be safe at least.”

She turned back to her panel and chewed her lip. “Thank you for being so nice to me.”

“You’re welcome,” he said with a sigh. He shuffled past her and headed for the tunnel.

She leaned to the side and tried to peer into the gloom beyond as curiosity took hold.

“So…so what’s down there?” she asked.

“The tunnel?”

“Yeah,” she said, leaning as far as she could from the stairs.

“Just two more rooms and another stairwell up to one of the other crypts.”

“That’s all?”

“The middle room is my lair,” he said. “You can come see it if you want.”

Heather stood up and carried her panel and scythe to the arched tunnel and looked down the twisting hall.

“Why is it so easy to see?” she asked.

“It’s a magical light. It makes the tunnels gloomy but visible.

“Oh,” she said as she looked around. The ceiling of the tunnel was eight feet high and arched slightly in the middle. It looked like packed dirt with roots hanging down in places. There were cobwebs along the arch and scratches in the wall that looked like claws. As the tunnel twisted, it arrived at a stone block doorway.

“So this is your room?” Heather said as she walked in.

This room was cut stone with a black marble floor. Two metal poles stood in the corners to her right. Each had a purple flame at the top that bathed the room in a strange glow. There was a long wooden table along the wall to her left and several large ceramic jars around one of the lamps to the right. In the very center of the room was an earthen pit with dark, musty soil. Wisps of white mist crawled out of this pit and dissipated into the room.

“So where do you sleep?”

“In the dirt there,” he replied as he pointed to the pit.

“You sleep in the dirt?”

“I am a ghoul,” he reminded her. “I don’t need to sleep at all, but If I sleep in the earth, I heal faster. If I'm slain in my graveyard, I will revive there later.”

“So you lay on it?” she asked, looking at the soil.

He shook his head. “I burrow into it.”

“How do you breathe?”

“I don't breathe,” he said. “None of the undead need to breathe. We can't be diseased and very few poisons work against us.”

“So you don't breathe at all?”

He shook his head again.

“So you could stay underwater for as long as you wanted?” she asked.

“I could stay underwater forever,” he replied. “But I don’t want to.”

“Huh,” she replied as she considered the advantages of the undead.

“Undead don’t feel the heat or cold very easily either. It has to be extreme heat or cold before we notice it.”

“So a fire doesn’t hurt you?”

“A fire still burns the undead. In fact, some undead are especially vulnerable to fire. But we could walk all day in the desert sun and be fine where a human would collapse.”

“You mean temperatures a human could survive in with water or warm clothes.”

“Yes. We don't need warm clothes for the cold. I could stand in the snow barefoot and be fine. Most undead are far more resistant to cold than heat. Ghost types are immune to it.”

“So undead are pretty powerful?” she asked.

“They are, but nobody wants to play them. There were more in the beginning, but the players kept killing them. There was a group of players who played a vampire society. They modeled it after some game they played. But people kept hunting them down and killing them.”

“If they picked vampire surely they are still vampires,” Heather pointed out.

Frank sighed. “If your character is killed enough times, they allow you to change.”

“They do?” Heather asked, now curious.

“I think that's to prevent this sort of problem. If you’re being killed over and over the visitors made is so you can change to something the other players won't kill.”

Heather saw the logic in that and the obvious problem. This only tipped the scales further and further in favor of the hero classes.

“This is why your graveyard is so far away from the city,” she said.

Frank nodded. “If I was closer I would be attacked constantly by hoards of players.”

“So if players don’t play monster races, who do the heroes battle?”

“The world has lots of naturally occurring races. You can even find wild ghouls. Every monster race has a wild version of the same kind. So there are wild vampires, trolls, goblins, and dragons.”

“There are dragons?” she asked.

Frank nodded. “I have never seen one, but I was told they are here.”

Heather silently hoped she would never see one.

“So the heroes battle against the natural monsters because they drove out all the player ones,” she said.

“I think so. I tried to play closer to the city, but only a few people would talk to me, and others would form big groups to hunt for me. That's how I learned about the vampire group. A few friendly players warned me and told me the others would come looking for me soon.”

“Because you’re worth experience,” she said as she began to understand. “So all the heroes do all day is ruin the fun of the monster players.”

“The heroes sometimes kill each other,” Frank said. “They hold arena battles, or mock contests to see who is the best.”

“What a joke,” she said.

“What’s a joke?” he asked.

“An alien race comes to study us, and we show it our worst characteristics,” Heather said.

“What do you mean?”

Heather looked at him and shook her head. “What would you think of a society that kills itself over and over again? That persecuted anything that wasn’t pretty enough for it? What if the aliens are ugly by our standards? What do you think they are learning about how we will treat them?”

Frank looked about his room a moment and twisted his fingers. “I never thought of it like that.”

“What if they are trying to see how we will react to direct contact?

Frank looked away and shuffled around the earthen pit. “They made this world to be competitive though,” he pointed out.

“They based it on our games. What if they didn't understand why we play them?” Heather suggested. “They are so different from us; we can't figure out how to communicate. What if they thought our games were communication?”

“They figured out enough to make us understand the purpose of the world,” Frank said.

Heather thought back to that. She remembered the news when it came out that the visitors were talking through a video game. She also remembered that they spoke volumes of text and that most of it was still unreadable today. The invitation to the world read something like “come, and we learn. Help us know you.” Now that she thought about it that could be taken a bunch of different ways.

“I still think we are giving them a bad example,” she said with a shake of her head.

“Maybe they like games too,” Frank Suggested. “They might be enjoying watching us and seeing how we compete.”

“Maybe,” Heather said.

Frank suddenly looked up and started to twist around

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Somebody is in the graveyard,” he said.

“My sign worked!” Heather exclaimed.

“I am going to go see who it is,” he said. “Feel free to explore the other room, but it looks like the first one mostly.”

She watched him walk down the tunnel they came from, and then she started to wander the room. There were some weapons on the table that she was only familiar with from movies. One was obviously a sword, and there were some long knives. One was an ax with a spike on the other end, and one looked like a baseball bat but had metal bands with spikes.

“Probably stuff he took from players,” she said as she walked over the ceramic jars. These were half as tall as she was and painted a faded blue. Inside she saw coins and golden beads and a few pieces of jewelry.

“And this is the gold he takes from them,” she said.

She looked up when she heard a cry muffled by the layers of dirt. She went back to the jars and tried to put what must be going on out of her head.

She decided to risk wandering down the tunnel on the other side and discovered an empty room just as Frank said. She carefully ascended the stone steps to the upper chamber. The mausoleum was empty as well, but the heavy wooden door was open, and a crack of light stretched into the gloom inside.

She crept to the door and looked out as her heart stopped.

“Frank?” she whispered.