Guild of Tokens Read online

  Guild of Tokens: Initiate

  Jon Auerbach

  Copyright © 2018 by Jon Auerbach

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover: Meir Srebriansky

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. In which I discover the world of Questing

  2. Girls who Quest

  3. Kansas City Shuffle

  4. The ties that bind

  5. Level up

  6. Questaholics Anonymous

  7. Tales from the Cantina

  8. Sufficiently advanced technology

  9. Girls’ night out

  10. Farhampton

  11. An apple pie from scratch

  12. The fruit of good and evil

  13. Mind reader

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Wait three days between Quests

  The first Quest was simple.

  I went to Chelsea Market during lunch, bought a handful of blueberries, a tillandsia, an apple popsicle, and three pounds of 90/10 ground beef. I left the goods in the windowsill of a brownstone on West 9th Street and then headed to Central Park, where the Requester had taped a plain, white envelope under a random bench. Inside was a wooden token, the size of a half dollar, with the number one intricately carved in the middle. I quickly hid it in one of my desk drawers, then proceeded to get absolutely no work done for the rest of the day.

  The second Quest was slightly more taxing. I waited the required three days before checking the Quest Board again. There didn’t seem to be any enforcement mechanism of the waiting time, but not wanting to upset anyone, I did as instructed. When I logged onto the Quest Board, the screen flooded with fresh Quests waiting to be undertaken. I soon found myself perched over the Hudson River, trying to fish out five small stones without falling in the disgusting brown water. My footing was sure, so I didn’t have to explain to my co-workers why I smelled like rotten garbage. The stones I placed in a brown leather pouch, which I left next to a fire hydrant in Chinatown. This time, I had to fetch my reward out of an unlocked mailbox up in the Bronx. I secreted away the token in the bottom of an old pair of shoes so that my nosy roommate wouldn’t find it and began the countdown again.

  The third Quest was another straightforward one. The headline was misleading-a promise to visit a quirky, forgotten shop-but when the full instructions arrived in my inbox, I sulked. A quick trip into Grand Central was all it took to find the cheap plastic bracelet, which I deposited in a garbage can on Track 18. This time, the token was close by, stuck between the pages of an issue of Nintendo Power.

  The fourth Quest was nostalgic. I again gathered up another weird menagerie of items and went back to the brownstone on West 9th Street. The items from the first Quest were gone, save for the popsicle stick, and I hoped that whoever had fetched them had gotten there before the popsicle had turned into a pile of mush. Or maybe they wanted the mush. Who knows. Another envelope awaited me when I returned to the same Central Park bench. Later, I pulled out the first token and set it aside the new one. The craftsmanship was undeniable. Maybe at some point, I would get to meet their creator.

  The fifth Quest was the most challenging by far. The instructions were multi-tiered and required precise timing. First, I had to board the last car of a downtown 6 train at 51st Street at 9:47 AM. I then had to exit the train at 33rd Street and re-enter the third car of that same train. Needless to say, I drew a multitude of stares when I burst through the closing doors of the third car. Second, I needed to exit the train at 14th Street and board a crosstown bus going west, standing in the middle of the bus without holding a handrail. Third, I had to exit the bus at 7th Avenue through the front door and take the first available taxi all the way down to Battery Park. These steps needed to be completed in no more than 47 minutes door-to-door. I arrived at Battery Park with minutes to spare, only to realize that the original instructions had stopped after this step. Dejected, I almost left to go home, but a small, intricately painted arrow on a sign caught the corner of my eye. I walked in the direction of the arrow, only to find another arrow on a second sign. That arrow led to several more (I lost count after the 11th one), as I zigzagged across the park. The final arrow pointed me to a set of stairs leading down underground. At the bottom was an imposing wooden door sporting a large iron knocker. I hesitated slightly before banging the knocker three times. Nothing happened. I waited. Still nothing. After several minutes of contemplating the exact number of knocks needed, a small portion of the door slid aside to reveal a pair of piercing, golden eyes.

  “You’re late.” The voice was raspy and deep-toned.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Tokens, please.”

  The Quest made no mention of bringing my tokens with me, but on a hunch, I had collected them from their various hiding places. I drew them out and a small, sooty hand reached through the slot and grabbed them from me. Before I could say anything, the slot closed suddenly with a thud. I stared at the door. Was this all some kind of stupid trick by a crazy person with too much time on their hands? Before my anger could get the best of me, the slot opened again and the hand reached out to give me something small and round. Another token I realized. But it was iron, not wood. The same number one was in the middle, etched elegantly into the metal. I grabbed the token greedily and before I could say anything, the hand withdrew back into the door and the slot closed again. Tucking the token away into my jacket, I danced happily up the stairs and into the mid-morning sun.

  When I logged onto the Quest Board again three days later, a new section had appeared. “Epic Quests,” it said. “Requires 185 gold tokens.”

  1

  In which I discover the world of Questing

  “We traveled across the ocean in search of a new beginning. What we found was something entirely different.”

  Rita van Asch, January 1, 1777

  I didn’t click the link at first.

  You wouldn’t have blamed me if I’d ignored it. The email looked spammy: every word was misspelled, the sender’s name sounded Eastern European, and it ended with an exhortation to “klik hear!”

  I had left the office just after midnight, after an exhausting 48-hour sprint cleaning up code that my jerk-of-a-co-worker Russ dumped on my lap so he could take a four-day weekend. The perils of being the only female programmer at a startup, I guess. And a pushover. Well, I’d show him, I thought. I’d do such an amazing job that it would force my boss, who was so used to Russ’s crap code, to marvel at my elegant functions. Or, more likely, he’d compliment Russ for taking time to rejuvenate himself so he could come back to work refreshed and ready to kick butt. Or he’d pat Russ on the back for giving someone like me the chance to do some “important” work. Maybe both.

  Anyway, I was flipping through my work email on the cab ride home when I saw it. “Epic quests 4 u!” the subject said. Probably one of those MMORPG ripoffs, I thought, but I opened it anyway, only so I could relegate the sender to the spam bin forever. With that accomplished, I drifted off as the cab sped down the FDR.

  Three weeks later, it showed up again. Unsurprisingly, Russ had taken all the credit for my hard work and then announced that he’d accepted a new job at our biggest rival in Silicon Valley. I worked through his goodbye party, documenting all of Russ’s code from the three pages of handwritten chicken scratch he had given me so we wouldn’t be flying blind once Russ the Great departed.

  “Epic Questers wanted!” this one said. Well, at
least their spelling improved this time. I opened it and read on.

  “Adventurous individuals needed. Complete Quests for treasure and glory. Click here!”

  In college, when no one was looking, I became obsessed with Warriors of Olympus, an online role-playing game where you fought for your chosen Greek god or goddess, completing quests, killing legendary monsters, collecting loot, that sort of thing. I fought for love. That is, the goddess of love, Aphrodite. It was exhausting. Not just because of the late nights I spent holed up in my room building my standing in the Aphrodite Guild, but also because I had to take great pains to make sure I never, ever, ever said anything about this nerdy passion to my friends, who wouldn’t be caught in the same state with such a game.

  I read the email over again for some clue as to why this mysterious game was worthy of my (virtual) blood, sweat, and tears, and my real time, money, and sanity, but no such clue was forthcoming. Off to the Mines of Moria with you then, foul email.

  It was another three months before the final email arrived. We were now in perpetual crunch mode, working around the clock, seven days a week, to ship a game months behind schedule that was lacking 60% of the features we promised in our Kickstarter campaign. But no worries, because all of our backers had gotten their t-shirts and posters and other crap that we had wasted 20% of our funds on. Money that could have been used to pay me, as I was now doing both my job and Russ’s job. Or to buy snacks for the office. Really, I would have settled for supermarket-brand bottled water.

  I had fallen asleep at my desk, the keys of my mechanical keyboard pressed into my face, when the ping of a new email roused me from my coma. It was 3:43 on a Sunday morning.

  “This is your final chance, Jen.”

  Great, now they know my name.

  “This is not a game. The Quests are real. The rewards are real. The glory is real. Do you have what it takes?”

  These jerks were relentless. They must only follow-up with the people who opened the earlier emails. Clever bastards. Well, now they finally had my attention.

  I clicked the link.

  My screens went dark. So did the ones to my left, the ones to my right, and all the ones in the row in front of me. If anyone else had been in the office, they would be losing their minds right now. Of course it was the girl who clicked on the ransomware email, they would say. Of course it was the girl who willingly pushed millions of lines of code into an encrypted lockbox that would cost the rest of the company’s cash to retrieve because she was so tired one night and got distracted by an email. An email of all things! I stared at my screens, waiting in the pitch black room for something to happen. Anything. But the gentle whirring of the computer fans had gone silent, leaving me utterly alone.

  It was then that the Quests appeared.

  The blinking cursor materialized first on my screen. Then rows of random characters whizzed by, as they moved up the black screen and out of sight. Finally, a set of letters formed. It looked like the beginning of one of those old school text-adventure games, before actual computer graphics, where everything had to be made out of ASCII characters.

  It said:

  “Welcome to Quest Board, new Quester!

  There are three rules.

  1. Wait three days between Quests.

  2. Finish what you start.

  3. Always Quest alone.

  May the light of adventure guide you.

  Happy Questing,

  The Council”

  I blinked, and the message was gone, and in its place was a prompt.

  “Enter your handle:”

  I paused to think of something appropriate. In my Warriors of Olympus days, I was JadePhoenix42. I rose quickly through the ranks and pretty soon was running the whole shebang. Then one day, a new player came along and turned the whole guild against me, got me kicked me out, and tried to get me banned from the game for good measure. After that, I retired the handle and stopped gaming altogether. But that was seven years ago, and maybe it was time to bring back the phoenix.

  I hit enter and then a list with ten numbered entries formed. I read the first one:

  “1. Wanted: a MetroCard receipt from the West 4th St station. Not your own. Leave on the top step. Reward: One wood”

  Then the next:

  “2. Pls give me some red leaves from Prospect Park. Reward: Eight wood”

  Then the next:

  “3. A Polaroid shot of the Raging Bull statue. Tape it on the construction wall at 1571 Second Avenue at exactly 5:32 PM tomorrow. Reward: One iron”

  Then finally:

  “4. Hi! Could you be a dear fetch me a handful of blueberries, a tillandsia, an orange popsicle, and three pounds of 80/20 ground beef from Chelsea Market? Leave in the windowsill of 194 West 9th Street. Thanks! Reward: One wood”

  I moved the cursor down until I reached the bottom of the list, where further instructions awaited.

  “Select your Quest, or press A for the next page, B to submit your own, C for Q-mail or Esc to quit.”

  That MetroCard receipt Quest seemed easy, so I went to hit 1, but before I could, it blinked out of existence and everything moved up one slot. The old number two seemed stupid and the new number two too precise, so I quickly hit 3 and pressed enter, as I wanted to go to the Market anyway to get some vegan sushi. The Quest list faded, except for my selection, and a new message appeared:

  “Remember your Quest. Skylarose101 is counting on you, JadePhoenix42!”

  With that exhortation, the Quest Board dissolved and I was left alone again in the dark. But only for a moment. In another blink, all the screens were back on and my stupid company wasn’t going to kill me after all. I put a reminder in my phone for tomorrow’s trip-sorry, Quest!-to Chelsea Market, grabbed my bag, and headed home, a new skip in my step, ready to grind my way to the top of whatever this crazy thing was. I was JadePhoenix42, reborn again.

  2

  Girls who Quest

  “The natives called this island ‘Manna-hatta,’ the Island of Many Hills. A more appropriate name would have been the Island of Many Secrets.”

  The dragon bowed before my might, the sword an extension of myself. I moved it with the fluidity of a dancer, the swiftness of a hummingbird, and the strength of an ox. The sword tore into the dragon’s flesh, yellow blood bursting out, drenching the stone floor of the castle tower. The blood-stained weapon fell from my hands, and it clanged against the cold stones. I felt my knees go weak as I too fell to the ground.

  When I opened my eyes, the rat was dead and the blood-smeared shovel next to it. I didn’t want to look at what I had wrought in the alleyway, the carnage I had unleashed for the sake of a few tokens. No, I wanted to leave the shovel and the dead rat and retreat back upstairs to the comfort of my railroad apartment. But I knew I couldn’t. It would be a waste.

  I regretted taking the Quest immediately.

  “Kill a rat with a shovel,” it said. “Reward: three wood tokens, but make sure you bring the rat to Washington Square Park within 15 minutes after you kill it or I don’t want it.”

  The first time I read it, it seemed like a win-win. There was a rat that lived in the alleyway next to my building and there was a shovel that the super usually left in the lobby. I would throw some leftovers into the alley, lure the rat out into the open, and then smash its stupid head open, ridding me of the anxiety that surfaced every time I heard that clash of claws on concrete and earning me some tokens in the process.

  Then I accepted the Quest and everything changed. I suddenly remembered that I went running the other way when I saw so much as an ant and had the athletic skills and coordination of a manatee to boot. There was no way I was going to stare down a disgusting rat and kill it with a shovel and carry it to Washington Square Park within 15 minutes.

  Maybe Duncan could do it. I mean, that’s what boyfriends are for, right? But he was in Hong Kong (again) raising money for his boss’s newest fund. As he had been for much of our relationship.

  We met at work actua
lly. He and one of the fund’s senior partners had come to the office two years ago to meet the engineering team as the initial part of their due diligence. There were only three engineers on the team then: me, Russ, and Andrew, who earned a PhD in comp sci from CalTech at 21. What he was doing at our rinky-dink startup I still wasn’t sure.

  Duncan and the senior partner impressed upon us that they made a point of investing in “diverse” companies and I was going to say that one white girl and nine white dudes hardly constituted diversity, but thought better of it and kept my mouth shut. As they made their rounds through the three rows of desks, Duncan kept turning his head back at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. I proceeded to look away so that our eyes wouldn’t meet, then eventually ran off to the bathroom to avoid further interaction.

  When I emerged 30 minutes later, Duncan was gone. He had, however, left his business card under my keyboard, with a short note scrawled at the bottom:

  “Going to be a pass, sorry, but ditching Bret to grab a drink tonight at Rigby’s if you’re not inclined to pass on me ;)”

  As far as pick-up lines went, it was pretty terrible. But I hadn’t had a date in months and we were just out of another crunch period, so I wasn’t surprised later when my feet carried me west on that rainy evening to Chelsea instead of east to the subway.

  The bar was packed when I arrived, and by the time I weaved my way through the thronging masses to Duncan, there was a drink waiting in front of the empty stool next to him.