The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 3 (2 page)

Darwin closed his eyes for a minute. “Wait . . . How old are you, Stephanie?” He had to ask. He knew he should have asked more important questions: How did she know he would need help? What had she asked Charles to do for him? But, for some reason, the age question was the first one to pop into his mind after listening to Charles, and it instantly took priority.

“What? Can’t date an older woman?” Stephanie just laughed. “Well, if you must know, I’m over a century old. For our people, demons and all . . . I’m actually kind of young. Don’t go ditching me just cause I’m a little older than you--especially not after all the trouble I went through to help you.”

“Wait a minute. . . What exactly did you ask Charles for help with? Was it just getting us out of Tiqpa?” Darwin put down the drink he was holding and shifted uneasily in his chair. He was starting to feel like a rat in a cage. He had trusted Stephanie, but now he was finding out that more and more bits and pieces of the story he had been fed weren’t exactly right. She had never said she was young or that she wasn’t a demon. He had simply taken those things for granted--and for a number of different reasons. She spoke and dressed like she was ten years his junior, and she had explicitly stated that she was a Gorgon when he first met her, a claim which had been backed up by the statuary she left in her wake. Of course, Darwin still knew all that could have been just Steph’s in-game character, but what had really convinced him his girl was closer to eighteen than thirty was the fact that she had said he was her first. True, there were women who made it to fifty, or even to the grave, without ever having a boyfriend, but it hadn’t even crossed Darwin’s mind to put her in that category. The way the information was being handed out piecemeal here and there didn’t feel right too, and things weren’t fitting together correctly--something was missing.

“She hasn’t told you? Hmm . . . I suppose that if I were stuck in Tiqpa, I would wait until I was free too before giving the you the rundown about your condition.” Charles took the napkin from his lap and neatly wiped the crumbs from the corners of his lips before continuing. “Well, this is directly related to the matter I wished to discuss with you, so we might as well put it on the table now: Darwin, you’re going insane. You’re slowly going to start feeling the effects of an insatiable bloodlust that is genetically passed down from one male to another throughout your kind.”

“I’m going insane?” Darwin mouthed more than spoke. “Bloodlust?”

“Bloodlust. Battle hunger. There are quite a few words that we could use to classify it, but the end result will still be the same. You’re going to find it increasingly more difficult to control your craving for bloodshed as time progresses, and, eventually, you will find yourself entirely incapable of distinguishing friend from foe.” Charles explained this all calmly, sipping his root beer as if it were a finely-distilled whiskey. “I’m sure you’ve already begun to experience this to at least some small degree.”

“I have.” Darwin nodded, the memory of his irresistible urge to kill during the last fight still fresh. “It was rather intense.” He studied his beverage with a sullen resignation as if there were answers in the soda that weren’t to be found anywhere else.

“About that, Dar Dar,” Stephanie said, once more tossing a piece of candy in the air and catching it in her mouth. “That’s just the start. You’ve only had the symptom for, what, a week?”

“Isn’t it game-related though?” Darwin had to ask. He had to believe that the only reason he was feeling that type of thirst for violence was because of that awful skill in the game.
It’s not like it would necessarily exist outside of Tiqpa. I never had any issues with it before I went there.

“A bit . . .” Stephanie’s face contorted as the third attempt to catch candy in her mouth failed, and a piece of milk chocolate struck against her left nostril before bouncing off and landing on one of her now-closed eyes, “But only in the sense that there are soul charges, a timer and a health bar quantifying its effects. Otherwise, it would be much harder to monitor and nearly impossible to manage.”

“If you knew all of this, how come you didn’t say anything sooner? Why didn’t I meet you before Tiqpa?” Darwin was still desperately trying to make everything fit together in his head.

“Well, that may be because your sister kind of hates me. Like, to the point where she wants to kill me. Maybe both of us . . . I don’t know. Charles, did you forget to send her chocolate chip cookies this year for Christmas?” Stephanie joked as she wiped the dark trail of shame off her nose and eyelid with the back of her wrist.

“I doubt that any amount of cocoa-filled treats will make her hate me less.” Charles said it in such a flat and matter-of-fact way that it almost felt like he had no personal attachment to the matter. “Tiqpa only added a timer and some other mechanisms to your hunger so that we would be able to measure and monitor the symptoms. It didn’t change the condition’s fundamental properties at all.”

“How is that even possible?” Darwin couldn’t decide if this science-fictionesque plot device, blood rage being harnessed by a video game, was more cliché or more ridiculous. Stephanie’s explanation was definitely both, and everything was starting to become harder to swallow than an uncracked walnut.

“Darwin, we can talk about all the details later. There’s still more to the big picture. You’re going insane. Stephanie and I built Tiqpa specifically for you, and it’s there to help you curb your rage so that no real people get killed. That’s why, eventually, we’re going to need you to go back.”

“I need to go back?” Darwin looked at the delicious food in front of him, then to Stephanie and Charles and finally at the portal. When Stephanie had first mentioned that all the NPCs in his faction could be brought through the portal, he had just assumed that he wouldn’t have to continue risking his life in Tiqpa to take care of them. He had thought that he and his people would be safe and happy, spending their hard-earned gold in the real world.

“Well, there are other options. We could arrange for you to kill livestock. Perhaps we’ll get lucky and a few butchered chickens will stop you from murdering everyone in the building or escaping to hunt down human victims until your appetite is sated. We won’t be able to constantly monitor your vitals or accurately track your hunger-related brain patterns until we can come to a far more complete understanding of your condition, but it’s up to you. I just want you to be informed before you make a choice.” Charles laid out the options clinically, his voice devoid of any form of emotion.

“DarBear . . .” Stephanie reached out and touched him. The familiar feeling was a little comforting, but also slightly unsettling. There was so much that he didn’t know about her, yet she had still put forth a great deal of effort for his sake. “You can’t tell me that the idea of playing video games to manage a condition is really a bad one. I thought the solution was cool. Can you imagine how few people would have cavities now if brushing their teeth were as exciting as a 2D platforming console game was when we were kids? If exercise were half as fun as most MMOs, Americans wouldn’t be struggling with a constant influx of diabetes like it was popcorn kernels on the floor of a movie theater.”

Truth
.
Who actually likes to do cardio?
he thought, agreeing with her. “So I have to go into the game every day, kill stuff and hope that I don’t die in the game?”

“Well, actually, should you die in the game, you will appear at the portal. It’s your bindstone. If you had died at any time before this conversation, you would have discovered that fact on your own. I don’t know how or when you came under the impression that dying in the game meant dying in real life, but it wouldn’t be much in terms of a treatment if it had such a high chance of getting you truly killed.” Charles smiled wryly. “More details Steph forgot to share, I take it?”

“Yes, something like that.” Darwin mentally kicked himself several times. He had gone through jaw-dropping trials, emotional drama and what felt like very real agony trying not to die in a video game that apparently had no penalty for death. It was like showing up to school thinking there was a horrible test waiting for you only to find out that it was a Saturday, and you didn’t even have to be there. He stared down Stephanie, finding his annoyance redirected. “Someone apparently forgot to tell me a lot.”

“Well, would you have done anything differently?” Stephanie returned his gaze. “I mean, would you have gone down the exact same ‘save the world and rescue the innocent humans’ route if you had? I thought that not telling you was putting you in the right frame of mind to do what was necessary.”

Darwin couldn’t argue with her logic. “Yes. I probably would have, but I would have been much less stressed along the way.”

“Psh. You’re a gamer. You have to play on hardcore mode, or it isn’t fun.” She just laughed, dismissing all of his near-death experiences as nothing more than a simple set of challenges in a game, and her response somewhat bothered him. Nevertheless, the weight of the conversation bore down on Darwin and left him with too much to think about to be mad.

“So I have to go back in there.” Darwin sighed, coming to the realization that the other choice he had been presented with really wasn’t an option. He had felt Hunger’s pull, and although he had only been experiencing its sudden cravings for a week, they were already frighteningly powerful.

“Yeah, but this time we’ll be prepared to start monitoring your brain activity to see if there is a cure. The entire program just went operational last week. Theoretically, the only way you should have been forced into Tiqpa is if your condition had started to trigger in real life because you had killed someone--a situation we didn’t expect to happen so soon. Now that we can chat and prepare you for what's to come, I don’t think there should be any problems. That said, it is still your choice as to whether or not you want to go back into the game. No-one will force you.”

“Sure, no-one will force you. Who could? But I imagine that your guild would be pretty bummed out if you just quit on them.” Stephanie shrugged. She had gone from playing with candy to fiddling with wrappers, twisting them around and making some sort of candy wrapper origami. “I mean, that weird redneck samurai, the anime kid on a sugar rush and your three unfried chicken wings might all take offense to you just randomly quitting.”

“Yes, and you must still consider your quest. Do you want to give up on the hopeful multitudes you have just brought together under the banner of freedom?” Charles asked, sipping his soda again in the same genteel way he had before.

Stephanie is right, but as for Charles . . . Is he being sarcastic?
Darwin couldn’t help but question the man’s intentions as he studied him. Darwin felt like the NPCs were real, but did Charles share the sentiment? There was no way to be sure whether or not the man across the table from him simply viewed Darwin’s growing faction as the product of a crazy man tilting at windmills or as a worthwhile endeavor. Trying to figure it out was like trying to tell whether or not a deadpan comic was actually telling a joke or if he was simply stating a fact without realizing it was funny.

Are they even real . . .
? He found himself suddenly torn on the topic. They were all programmed by other people or created by the AI, so to even think of them as real was like considering the images on your television as real. After interacting with them for even a short period of time, however, it was hard not to. Sitting at the table, outside Tiqpa, it was easy to dismiss the hundreds of game characters he had helped. They were NPCs; this was real life. But just a few minutes ago, coming off that battlefield, mourning the dead with his fellow faction mates, it was real. They were as real as any person he had ever met, and their grief wasn’t something to be discounted in the least.

“You know, it’s kind of funny,” Stephanie interrupted his troubled cogitations, drawing the attention of both gentlemen.

“Huh?”

“Well, your name is Charles, and his name is Darwin.” Stephanie cracked a big smile. “If it wasn’t unintentional, it wouldn’t be as amusing.”

Even Charles hinted at a smile for a moment before straightening out his face again. “Yes, it is amusing. Especially given the way he’s evolving right before our very eyes.”

“Evolving? I don’t know. The only change I can see is that he has gotten really horny lately.” Stephanie laughed as she reached out a hand and flicked one of Darwin’s horns. “Though I’m not sure they help with the reproductive success of our species.”

Darwin flinched as the vibration traveled through his head. “Wait . . . They’re still here in the real world?” He asked more for an explanation of why, rather than an actual confirmation of what was plainly obvious.

“Why wouldn’t they be? Your original body was the one that gained them--not a game avatar.” Stephanie giggled as if this were some common sense piece of information that even a two-year-old would know. “You actually, physically, went in and out of Tiqpa. Most, if not all, of the changes that took place there are going to carry over into the real world.”

“Even the--” Darwin was about to ask more about the portal situation, when a question sprang back into his head--one he hadn’t been able to shake off. “You knew I was going to go insane for a long time. How?”

Stephanie’s tone, despite all her usual amusement and pep, flattened out like that of a boring professor at the end of a lecture. “Because all demon men do. A few of us women too, but every man does for sure. It’s inevitable.”

“Huh?” Darwin needed more of an explanation than that. It was like she was explaining that the sky was blue because everyone saw it as blue. It didn’t tell him anything.