HokumPocus

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: The Dungeon -- The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

Alex's moment of victory had been cut short when what looked like an oversized bat clambered throughout the now cramped bridge. It was greatly wounded, fortunately, but that was of little comfort to him. Surrounding both the creature and his party were a pack of beasts that looked like bipedal canines, their oversized claws scraping against the stone ground with every oversized step. They lurched and tumbled rather than ran, their movements monstrous yet human enough to be far more disturbing than if they were only the former.

Bow drawn, his silver eyes drank the traces of light with fervor. Despite their uncanny movements he was able to pinpoint their strange bodies with ease, the exotic markings on their bodies stretching with every breath all over whatever their rags couldn't cover.

"Seele!"

They had advanced, and fast. Within what felt like only seconds a stray had bounded towards the caster, as if it were ignoring every other player. But Alex was faster. A fully retracted bow with an arrow that was meant for one of his kin at a distance had instead streaked towards the surprise dogman, only a few feet in front of him. The arrow didn't pierce the creature's warped head so much as it liquified it, setting loose a riptide of blood that sprayed in every direction. He felt the warm liquid hit his face, metallic, sharp.

This was no longer a game, it was a life or death situation. Every single situation that involved combat was. Even the ones that didn't posed the possibility of painful injury or death, as he had first seen in the room of pressure plates. Rather than think about any of the risks or danger, he conjured a second arrow. This was his one and only chance at living a happy life, and for these disgusting, lowly creatures to try and take that from him? It filled him with a fury he didn't know he was capable of. If it was him or them, they were all going to die.

The second arrow fired far faster and dug itself into the abdomen of an injured one, trailed by two more. He fought like this, ignoring the dire bat entirely in favor of being a constant nuisance and threat to the dogmen. Every exposed belly or pair of legs was a warm recipient for metal, a target that could be incapacitated and made wet and crimson. The rest of his party followed through in this, with walls of earth and wind and curses beginning to make even reaching their human a battle in of itself. Their group was following a rhythm it seemed, each of its members finding congruence with one another.

Just as he settled for making sure the incapacitated remained that way or worse, a pair that had recovered from Kazuki's wind bounded for him. He used an erratic burst of wind to launch himself sideways, colliding bodies with a beast that had been shambling. It turned around sluggishly, revealing that half of its entrails were on the floor. With a dull thud, it collapsed. But what if that hadn't been the case? His wind could have helped him, but that needed to be closely monitored now. He cursed under his breath, at not being careful enough. The pair had their sights set on him, and there was no turning back. No running away, no hiding, no depending on any other player. He grounded himself and unleashed a rapid stream of arrow after arrow.

The first creature collapsed from enough hits to the skull, letting out a whine of agony as the arrows embedded in its legs snapped and dug themselves further with the force of the fall. The second reached Alex and carved into his upper chest, sending him falling on his rear. He kicked the creature with a leg and sent it toppling with a burst of wind. As the pair skidded on pools of blood Alex rose faster.

"You're not gonna kill me," he hissed. As his opponent struggled to get up, he fired rabidly at its arms and head, ignoring his injured body's protests. For a moment, it seemed as if the battle was going to wage on, but an arrow that popped its eye signalled the beginning of the end as many more accompanied it. It was dead.

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: The Dungeon -- The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

Alex had been out of it, to say the least. The people around him underwent serious emotions, some of them switching from one extreme to another from what he could guess, but none of it truly registered in his mind. It was as if he was trapped inside his own head as an observer, gazing at the rest of the world from a foggy window. As he returned to his senses it felt like waking up for the first time, the mixture of euphoria and discomfort, the good kind that kept him alert. He was alive and in the body of his dreams and equipped with powers. Consequences could be ignored...

...But there were his parents to think about. They loved him and he wanted to make them proud. But they didn't know about his identity, nor did he think they would approve of it. And so much of their lives had been invested in raising him and providing him with the best life they could. But I want to be happy too. But his future as a professional needed to be considered. The world of freelancing was a tough one where industry standards changed every couple of months and work would disappear right in front of you unless you were constantly fighting for it. There were long-term projects that were depending on him, e-mails and phone calls that needed to be made. But I want to be happy too. But his friends were back at home, probably missing him. They had made plans with him, wanted to see updates on some things he was making for them. Sure, none of them understood him beyond a surface level, but it was fine as long as they kept seeing each other. But that's not my happiness. That's theirs.

I just want to be happy too.

It was a cruel joke. The boy who kept himself under so much pain to let the world revolve with no complications, now having the opportunity of a lifetime dangled in front of him with no certainty to it whatsoever. His breaths remained sharp despite the exhaustion having waned considerably, and his sense of freedom was beginning to fade as well. None of his doubts or yearning or wishes mattered if they were all dead.

"A chasm, huh." The words were aimed at himself more than anyone else. He could avoid that strange loop of guilt by keeping his thoughts confined to the outside. With fatigue now being a permanent addition to their trek, the idea of using wind abilities to get across was discarded immediately. In its place was... nothing at all, really. Being faced with an impenetrable wall of darkness gave one very little in the way of artistic inspiration, he realized. With a vague shrug that only hinted at his turbid interior, he dug out the potion of moonlight he was given and began to chug it like an energy drink.

"Bleh, this thing tastes so bad, what the hec- holy fuck I have night vision." He messily wiped his mouth as his warm eyes shifted to a shade of silver. The opposite side of the chasm was now visible, although the results were disappointing. "Looks like it's nothing but rocks. There's four weird ones, though." It reminded him of cartoons where you could tell something wasn't part of the background because it was drawn slightly different. He wanted to say that, but even someone like him knew it wouldn't make for very good commentary.

"Wait, I got it." He drew his bow in a single movement and began firing at every one of the four stones. They were large and stationary targets, so all it took was extra time to secure the success every shot.

After a brief pause the groan of shifting weight could be heard reverberating throughout the dungeon. The bridge was starting to lower. He knew it was in poor form to keep treating this as a game but... four out of four? "Awesome," he said. He held up his free hand, expecting a round of high fives.

Eɴᴛᴇʀ — Into an Isekai World

---

Kotana

---

Hiroko's words interrupted a lingering thought of his, causing his features to soften immensely. "I suppose you're right." Something about the threat of combat had made the simplest of activities sound relieving. Even the bland meal they just ate had been a tranquil experience. He didn't think of it as mundane, though. Was a Japanese adult realistically ever going to be in a situation where they had to travel on horseback? It sounded fantastical, though he kept the thought to himself.

He tensed at Honami's comment. She meant no harm, sure, but she had the disrespectful habit of treating him as an equal. He realized with a small sigh that it would be pointless to speak out, as Japanese societal conventions no longer applied. He'd... have to get used to such a thing. This was a situation that extended far beyond an adult and a teenager having a conversation. "I'll accept the offer in the case that does happen, thank you." He rolled his shoulders with a newfound loss of respect. Not because he thought less of the people around him, but because he realized he could loosen up with the responsibility of being a modest Japanese man. "Our old world was certainly different, to say the least. Does this one really not have machines?"

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: The Dungeon -- The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

"Why do you let them call you Alex?"

It had been in the third grade. No? Fourth grade. During recess, a sudden question from Mrs. Wynn. He had shrugged.

"I don't know."

He really didn't know. It just made sense. It was weird to call a Ben a Benjamin, so it was weird to call an Alex an Alexis. But the question had stayed in his mind after that day, like a little seed that kept growing. Or was it a weed? It felt like a weed sometimes.

It feels good.

That had been the most he could figure out. The question didn't sound important, something his mind put next to the grades on his history tests or his favorite dinosaur. A question with an obvious answer people asked because they like talking. But that didn't feel right. He didn't know a lot of big words, or if it was something that was important in the first place. So his mind had put it away. Adolescence however... had shaken everything around.

Throughout its spread his body had begun turning into something else, something that was no longer synchronized to his mind. It was a foreign thing that actively behaved like an enemy, a thing that provoked disgust with every new change and twist that sprouted from the inside. The weeds were blooming now, choking him, controlling him. They had a way of spreading beyond his body too, touching things that were innocuous and covering them in thorns.

"Any cute boys at school?"

That was dangerous. If he couldn't find a way to deal with that quickly, it would start to grow. And if it grew more, the weeds would cover more things, more questions, more whispers between people when he wasn't in the room. It was impossible to make the sharp parts that poked and prodded go away, but he had to at least try.

"People are gonna get the wrong idea if you keep cutting your hair that short!"

He couldn't stop it. He really, really couldn't stop it. That feeling of constricting weeds was growing and suffocating him from the inside out. He had to get rid of them somehow, even in ways he knew just spread them around further, ways that would make the feeling worse for him later on. He had developed a system at least, methods and tricks to ease things. Safe articles of clothing that he could wear. Cosmetics he was comfortable applying. Although it helped, it was like an uphill battle, one he was shoved into nearly every day.

Then Pariah Online had launched. The game that boasted an avatar generation system attuned to your deepest desires, the one that let him visit beautiful scenery and create whatever he wanted. It was a happy dream he could have in a doll-like, numbed avatar that made the constriction go away, a dream he began to love more than reality itself.

***

The messenger was gone, leaving only turmoil in his wake. Alex was... at a complete loss for words. He could only mutter snippets of the man's over and over again. Adrenaline coursed through his weary body and made his legs quake, and his chest rose and fell at an intense rhythm that couldn't find its footing. Was he doubtful? Happy? Scared? He didn't know, couldn't know under the raw crash of sensations.

He was going to spend more time in this beautiful dream. But it was different now. It was no longer an avatar, it was his body. Every bruise, nick, and scratch that hummed in pain with every breath belonged to him and him alone. And as the palms of his hands felt the muscle and bone fit for a man through his equipment, he cracked a small grin. A crooked, wiry, broken grin. His next words were a whisper, one even he could barely hear.

"It feels good."

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: The Dungeon -- The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

The stench of blood would not disappear. They could trek away from the corpses, advance towards the engulfing darkness, and even fight against a ceiling that got closer to gnashing their bones with every passing second, but they could not get rid of the metallic, rotten scent. When Graves had made the almost fatal mistake of activating a pressure plate, it had returned in a bloom of red that refused to be ignored. The heat, the stench, none of it compared to the pain. Raw and unfiltered, his bellow tore through the room. They would have to approach every tile around them with caution, lest a worse punishment would trigger.

"Graves..." muttered Alex. This wasn't a fit of anger from a misplay or some frustration from a puzzle. It was a reaction to pain. There were no words that he could say, no easy fix. They would just have to figure out a way to solve the puzzle before anyone was next.

""Pull now? So we're gonna need someone to pull a lever then," said Alex, in reference to the riddle. A lever. Singular.

The pressure plates. The others in his party had already begun trying out ideas, working around the restrictions posited by being mostly melee attackers. Benkei had reached the door even, reading a cryptic inscription out loud. Alex was an archer on the other hand, so his first line of thought was to think of a way to use that to his advantage.

But a different idea came to him. He had a strong affinity to wind, one that allowed him to use it in combat. Only in small doses, just enough to help him jump an extra few feet or knock an opponent off balance, but if he were to push much, much further...

After a moment of both mentally readying himself and bringing his body close to the ground, he jumped towards the tiles in a dive tackle, his body parallel to the ground. His body was propelled by wind and began to glide across the area in an awkward motion, propelled almost entirely by the minor skill. He'd done this before, although the power it required tended to stifle his abilities. This time, however, there was something different. He could feel himself enervated with every passing second he glided. The closer he got to the other side, the more it intensified, to the point where he briefly considered what would happen if he were to crash across the tiles.

After what felt like an uncomfortably long moment of silence, he found solid ground. It could have been more gracefully executed, but he did it. The moment he tried to stand upright was when things got strange. Whatever this tech demo was attempting to showcase had apparently included exhaustion, and the consequences of pushing a minor ability to its absolute limit had hit him like a freight train. One of his hands groped the wall for balance, the other briefly hovered over a lever... with an inscription on its base. A bow. He wanted to pull it, just to see what would happen. It sure looked interesting. The hand ended up settling on his thigh, however.

"I can..." he panted, "I... did it! What... lever are we supposed to pull?"

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: The Dungeon -- The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

As the heat began to rise to unprecedented highs, Alex found himself visibly puzzled at the change in mechanics. Where another player would have kept their mouth shut out of a fear of looking inexperienced, the worry hadn't crossed his mind in the first place. "Man, this heat sucks. Don't tell me all the new raids are gonna have stuff like this to make it harder on us." His light armor was merciful at least. The tanks in their formation couldn't say the same. At the speed they were going, they were gonna get cooked like lobsters by the time they reached the entrance. Or at least, the speed he felt they were going. The heat was starting to make time feel heavier, he realized.

He was tempted to whistle a tune to pass the time. Of course, that would have been idiotic in any other raid, given the propensity this game had for sudden combat against monsters with names he needed help and roughly three tries to pronounce correctly. But this... was different. No rustling from within the undergrowth, no tracks left on the ground, nothing. Just the heat. God, the heat. It made the Canadian slightly homesick.

When they had at last reached the entrance of the dungeon, the odd sensations continued. Smells, this time. The naturally repulsive odor of a cave mixed with the eventual rot the second they finally entered combat. Alex was no stranger to the occasional hike in real life, so the discomfort did little to actually affect him from fighting. He was even piqued to a certain degree, wondering what other new technologies the game developers were going to try and showcase. The murals the two groups stumbled on only made the gears in his head spin faster.

A small grin crept through his face. Benkei picked the path with seemingly more traps than combat. When it came to the minutiae of combat and the metagame, Alex trailed behind the rest. But when it came to traversing obstacles, combining enhanced athleticism with wind powers granted him quite the potential for sneaking around.

As they walked, they talked in controlled voices. "Hmm, yeah," he said vaguely, in response to Seele. "I'm all offense and no defense, but these tanks can cover that part for me while I cover for Kazuki."

He raised his voice so the rest of the group could hear. "Hey, do you guys think this might be because of something like a tech demo?" he asked. "My brother's into tech stuff, and he says companies usually do them as a way of showing off what they can do with new technology. The weird smells and heat- this raid could be a way for them to show new updates off. On top of that those demos are always short, and we haven't really fought a lot of monsters. That could be what's going on."

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: Wayfarer's Retreat -- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

Alex flashed a quick thumbs up at Kazuki after Benkei finished assigning their team's roles for the raid. "Looks like I'm gonna be your bodyguard, man." He felt like giving him a slap on the back, but they hadn't been well acquainted enough for Alex to do that, so he settled for the awkward gesture.

Most of his raids had been done with the magic-heavy team compositions his brother's guild naturally produced, so it was reassuring to know his role was nothing out of the ordinary. On the contrary, the amount of tanks was galvanizing. Entering combat lacking tank support meant having to get good at not being swatted around. With teammates like his current ones, he'd be able to go all out with his arrows. He thought of all the movement and attack combinations he'd been taught in a similar fashion, with special attention given to the ones that were too risky to pull off without a distraction. Another ruckus in the hall snatched his attention, however.

"Someone's getting engaged in-game?! You can do that?!" he exclaimed, eyebrows stretching towards their limit. People took online relationships on this game pretty seriously with all the immersion it gave players, so it wasn't completely unbelievable that someone would take it a step further. But still... proposing in some dumb hall before a raid of all things?

"Hey, congratulations!" he said at last.

It had been an odd thing to do, but it was still cute. His teammates, too, paused their actions to admire the sight in similar ways, with one reaction in particular startling him.

"Huh, You all right there Kalie?" he asked. Her queenly veneer had slipped for a fraction of a moment in a way that was surprisingly endearing. No talk of darkness or shadows, just a simple appreciation. "It's good to take a break from roleplay every now and then you know," he said, suppressing a chuckle.

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: Wayfarer's Retreat -- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

Another player in his position would've been shaking in his boots, but Alex could only feel excitement. He didn't care about the competition or the violence in games, it was the cooperation that got to him. Everyone working together to synergyze and get things done. It was a level of satisfaction he knew a proper desk job was never going to give him. He approached his new team alongside Kalie with a notable energy to his steps.

"Hey, I'm Alex. You guys can probably already tell what I do," he turned around and jutted a thumb at the bow strapped to his back, "Ranged DPS!" That he was one of if not the least skilled player didn't faze him, as his role was solitary by the looks of things. If no one else could specialize in ranged DPS, then it created a niche for him, a sort of importance that ensured he was useful. It was... a source of confidence he kept to himself.

He doubted they were going to care much about micromanagement. Alja, through their brief interaction, had come across as an agreeable person, and the other woman had offered people free sandwiches. You couldn't just give people free sandwiches and wind up being evil or something. The healer too, seemed like a laid-back guy. With teammmates like this, the leader just had to be as cheery as their current party was shaping up to be.

Right?

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: Wayfarer's Retreat -- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

Ah, game talk. When you pretended to live in a fantasy world that didn't have bad traffic or sports teams that made more than small countries, everyone seemed to default to game talk. Even the weather never came up. Of course, Alex had been trained in the art of it from dozens of conversations with his brother's introverted friends, so he found himself contributing with a newfound sense of familiarity.

"I'm a ranged DPS with a glass cannon build and a kit based on firing super fast arrows that can deal a lot of really good single target damage," The slang he had been taught rolled off with ease, and he took a moment to make sure both Kalie and Siegfried were listening. "It's like... the opposite of a sniper. I have to get closer to bad guys and risk myself some more, but if there's a tank with me or anyone else who can pull off a distraction, I can really do some crazy damage. There's a lot of guys like that here, so I'm pretty sure I can do a good job versus whatever it is that's gonna be in that dungeon."

He laughed awkwardly once more at Kalie's comments. It was hard to tell when someone deep into roleplaying was being serious at times, and she was no exception. On the contrary, she seemed to be the poster child for it, mentioning a nickname and assassination back to back. Was this just the fantasy world's equivalent to a conversation by the water cooler? "Uh, yeah, fighting here would be a pretty bad idea anyways. I mean, imagine finishing a dungeon and having to wash beer out of your gear instead of celebrating," he said, amused at the thought.

The Voyagers of Duonia: A Medieval Fantasy RP

---

The others had made good points. Ludith was just as familiar with villagers' tendency to let their mouths run, in truth. Wouldn't be a good huntress without the ability to put together a cohesive narrative, what a beast looked like, who it tore apart, how and when. The cacophony of sensations had made her assume that information would've been hard to acquire, and she had already begun internally chastising herself for having made a lapse in judgement. A lapse in judgement that could have spiralled into a grave mistake, one that could have led her to her doom had this been an excursion.

"A more traditional way of running things," she uttered to no one in particular, once again shaking off encroaching thoughts. Despite her initial hesitation at cooperating with others, she found herself greatly benefiting from their words. She aimed a nod at Dular. "With places like this, people stick together more, talk more."

Her gauntlets traced the sheath of her blade in a single movement. It was good to feel its weight, know it was there. The cuirass, too, had a satisfying way of digging itself into the sides of her chest. "The tavern is a good place to start then. A tongue wet with alcohol can be wrung for truth."