Darkness Named Read online

  FLASH EVENT: Can you gather the flowering herbs before they wilt? Treasures abound in this Stealth Challenge Event! For a limited time—

  Tanisha frowned at the event alert. Almost immediately, her phone began to quack a few times as the Unofficial dARkness Eris channel started the usual cacophony of @everyone shouts that came whenever the game pushed an unexpected announcement.

  She put her phone on DND, but stared at the notification for a moment anyway. DeKR had never put out an event that wasn’t accompanied by an announcement thirty-six hours before hand. So, that was weird enough. But they’d also never had an event start anytime besides midnight GMT, which was almost four hours ago.

  Curiosity got the best of her, and Tanisha clicked on the notification, launching the game.

  After the loading screen, the game went to the main menu, which was on the screen for barely a moment before the orange “announcement” banner popped up with the event details. She scrolled past the description of the event, paying only cursory attention to it so she could scope out any unexpected twists. Tanisha knew what to expect from a Stealth Challenge event—it was a few special harvest nodes guarded by patrolling monsters with obnoxiously high defensive stats and no drop rewards. They were supposed to encourage players to avoid their attention while they harvested the goods. Some people saw it as a personal challenge to mow them down anyway.

  Everything about the event looked standard to Tanisha, and so she didn’t stop scrolling until she got to the rewards section of the announcement. She grimaced at the image. The text was, as always, vague and unhelpful, promising at least one purple rarity item, and any of a large list of others. But the image told the whole story. The purple item depicted was a coiled red spool, unmistakably the refined Bloodthread she needed for her bow.

  “Son of a…”

  Tanisha stared at the image for a while, and she imagined how much she could get done if she didn’t need to spend all morning making the Bloodthread from scratch. There was a chance she could get it handed to her? And all she had to do was navigate an event that dropped into her lap on just the right day?

  She looked out the window over her bed to the nighttime sky. It was late. Sure, it was only around 9pm, but it was too late for her to go out for an event now. It was likely still going to be active in the morning, right? She’d be able to get it done after breakfast, but before she went out to Three Forks. And even if she didn’t, there would be other events. Not to mention that she was perfectly capable of getting the Bloodthread on her own.

  It wasn’t worth going out in the dark just for the sake of her impatience.

  Nodding firmly, Tanisha closed the game. Only to see her notifications finally. In the time she’d been contemplating the event announcement, the dARkness Eris channel had gone wild. The server icon just had a little 99+ next to it.

  Tanisha wanted to put her phone down and get back to her book, but her curiosity once more won out. She clicked on the server.

  The channel where people posted their drops was still the primary channel open, and the place was a circus. She could see three gold-bordered legendary drops as soon as the program opened, and, as she stared, two more popped up beneath them.

  “What the hell is going on?” Tanisha murmured to herself. That was more legendaries than were normally posted in an average day, all in the last twenty minutes? She clicked over to the announcement board to see a forest of meme-y Fs and F-shaped emoticons.

  Grimacing, Tanisha scrolled up until she saw the joke.

  PsiRaver said (today at 9:10 PM) Some intern down at DeKR is about to get fired so hard the flames will be visible from space! Looks like the usual drop tables are in effect for the completion rewards, but according to all DAT mining from dARknessSweeper, all of the drop rates are MAXED OUT. Every item category has a 100% drop chance, and always drops the maximum number of items coded. Appears it guarantees one legendary drop from the usual non-holiday event list, and a whopping THREE of the banner’s displayed Bloodthread, two other purple drops, and a full FIFTEEN blue items. And 25 common items no one cares about. Press F to pay respects for the poor intern who brought us this bounty, and do the event NOW because they will absolutely be fixing this as soon as they see what’s happening!

  Tanisha stared at the message for a long moment.

  One Bloodthread hadn’t been enough to get her out of bed. But three? There were some high-level armor she could start working on with the extras.

  And there was the guaranteed legendary.

  She cursed and unplugged her phone from the charger before rolling out of bed. A discarded pair of leggings were on the floor and she put them on before cursing again.

  In fact, she cursed a lot.

  And loudly.

  Because if they had the drop rate fixed before she got her loot, she was going to be very upset.

  Chapter 5

  Tanisha was in her outdoors chair within record time. Before heading outside, she snapped an LED lantern onto the hook in the front of the chair and pushed herself out the door. She was irritated and grumpy, but also was potentially about to get the loot of a lifetime.

  F, indeed.

  She took a look at dARkness once she was outside and almost cursed again when she saw the distance marker for the event beacon. It was miles away. Only the fear of disturbing her neighbors kept her from belting out a stream of profanities. It was possible that she could reset the app and make it reload to a new location, but the chance that it would be much closer would be slim.

  And it would likely put the beacon on private property.

  Right now, the direction and distance told her this beacon was in Bonnie Lure State Park, which, while not ideal, was at least unlikely to result in a trespassing charge. State parks in Oregon were closed at sunset, but authorities were pretty lax about it as long as you didn’t try and stay after they asked you to leave.

  Tanisha hefted herself up into her truck and belted herself in, using the seatbelt as an anchor to help her manhandle her chair up off the ground and into the space behind her seat, only half-folding it. Just enough so that it would fit, but not enough that she’d have to go through the trouble of unlocking it when she got to Bonnie Lure. The state park was nearly 30 minutes away, and Tanisha wanted to be on her way back out of the woods before 11 pm, even if she knew it was a nearly impossible goal.

  Since she mostly stuck to back roads, the drive was uneventful. Tanisha hated driving in the dark, especially since her accident, but there were few people on the road and her brights were nearly fluorescent. When she got to the park, her truck was the only one in the parking lot. It felt odd, but since her truck was the only vehicle there, it would stick out to any ranger or other officer who patrolled by it. She wasn’t planning on being here for long, and so she didn’t anticipate getting into too much trouble.

  At worst, she might come back to find a ticket on her windshield, though a more responsible officer would go out looking for her first, and they might let her off with a warning if they didn’t need to put her name and picture on one of those “missing hiker” boards around the park.

  That thought sent a shiver up her spine.

  How many of the people on that board had been doing exactly what she was doing now? As competent as she was, going into the woods this late was dangerous. And she knew it. Even if she was only going to be on, or near, a major trail and within a mile of her truck, it was always possible to get turned around in the dark. She could stumble into some hazard. Like, for instance, she could tumble end-over-end into a narrow ravine and be trapped under her chair. Or, if the event ended up really close to the river, she might get mired in mud, and if her chair got stuck, she’d be making it out of the woods on her hands.

  Not to mention that she was closer to Mount Hood here, and there could be more creatures of a predatory nature.

  Tanisha set her jaw and unfolded her chair before climbing down into it. As soon as she was in her chair, she was off in a hurry. The LED lamp she had gave
her more than enough illumination to see by, as long as she didn’t ignore any shadowy patch that might hide a pothole or puddle. It caused her to focus on the darkness that lurked ahead as she entered the treeline on the clear dirt patch towards the beacon.

  Every bit of foliage became a hunk of shadow, and loose branches lanced up and around, molding into palms and grasping fingers. These clutched at her from just out of the circle of her light, and Tanisha bade herself to not look lest she be terrified into returning back to her bed empty handed.

  Instead, she focused on the path. It was an easy one, since the park was close enough to civilization that hundreds of feet would have tamped down and flattened the route over the course of every season. Her only struggle was the narrowness of the path in places. She had to slow to a crawl to manage her chair as one wheel crunched over the plant life on the side of the path multiple times before she was able to reach the location of the beacon.

  “I just hope I make it in time,” she said out loud, trying to cover the quiet rush of wind through the trees with her own voice, both to keep herself calm and to make sure she was making more noise than the grunting and rattling of her wheels. She didn’t want to disturb some bedded-down wildlife.

  The idea of stumbling upon a bear here was laughable, but if she rolled over the tail of a raccoon or some sort of feral cat, this quick trip would turn into an all-nighter after she drove herself to the hospital for some stitches and a tetanus shot. And if she was unlucky, a rabies shot. “If they fix the drops before I get there, I swear there will be hell to pay.”

  She entertained the idea of giving up—godly drops be damned—but then the beacon came into view on the screen as more than a minimap icon. The path ahead seemed to curve away from it, and while there was a possibility it would angle back later, Tanisha didn’t want to risk the chance. It was nearly 10 PM now, and her body was offering some complaints about her still being awake. So, Tanisha turned towards the beacon and crashed heedlessly through the undergrowth, towards the spot.

  Soonest begun, soonest done, right?

  She tried to keep her chair upright and moving as she forced her way over lumpy tree roots and the leafy ferns that crunched under her tires. The fingers of shadow cast by her LED lamp grew taller as she left the clear path, forcing the grasping hands to grow longer and leaner. Tanisha swallowed hard and willed herself not to look.

  Within five minutes of her divergence from the path, the event came into view. Her camera activated, and her screen showed her a few small plants guarded by creatures known as crabstrocities. She could tell that’s what they were by their domed shells and large pincers. Tanisha thought she was still too far inland for these creatures to be the guardians of the event, but arguing with the bugged event would be fruitless. She just needed to get in there, get her drops, and get out.

  With a frown, Tanisha held her lamp up with one hand to give the area more light. She got a good view of the event area before returning the lamp to its hook. It wasn’t nice and even, and she was likely to struggle a bit to navigate. But it wasn’t going to be impossible, and she would be able to deal with a mistake or two, since her HP was so much higher than the average player’s.

  The combat warning popup filled Tanisha’s screen as she got closer, and she dismissed it immediately. She opened her inventory and navigated to her equipment screen. This was a stealth event, and so Tanisha wouldn’t need her regular armor. Instead, she changed Koest’s armor from the thicker blackened bear hide and metal plates to something she’d made from the thinner leather of the racoyote. It offered a reduced detection radius, and, while it wasn’t likely that she would need it, it would still be nice. Crabstrosity guards meant that getting into combat was highly ill advised, since their claw attacks covered a wide, dangerous arc, but their sideways walking pattern made their vision cones easier to avoid.

  In addition to her lighter armor, Tanisha also took the time to unequip her bow and instead put on her machete. It would increase her plant-gathering speed, which would reduce the amount of time she might be stuck here.

  With a deep breath, Tanisha gathered herself as she watched the giant mud-covered crabs patrol for a moment, studying their movement patterns around her primary objective—the gathering points. Her sense of urgency was gone, now that the event had spawned on her phone.

  To prevent data manipulation, drops were generated as soon as the event was engaged. If she had made it in time to get the bugged drops, she wouldn’t lose them as long as she completed the event now, without exiting the app.

  Naturally, the patrol patterns weren’t stupidly complicated. DeKR’s developers had toyed with the idea of having higher-difficulty stealth events that would play out like a complicated puzzle, requiring up to an hour of careful observation and perfect timing to manage. But the playerbase had hated those events, and so they had been phased out in favor of relatively simple ones. There were only four crabstrocities patrolling in rectangular patterns around the three herb spawns, and Tanisha could see their line of sight outlined as red cones, projected like they were attack patterns.

  It didn’t take long for her to see the perfect route through their patrols. Tanisha fitted her phone into its holder and darted out into the area, heading for the first spawn.

  On her phone screen, Tanisha could see the vision cones sweep around her. She squeezed through between them. There was a window of about thirty seconds to gather the first herb before the nearest of the crab-like creatures would spot her. The gathering animation took about ten seconds, and her machete reduced the time by nearly two seconds.

  She gathered the herb—not adding any items to her inventory, but filling up a third of the “event progress” bar at the bottom of her screen. Without hesitation she darted away well before any of the monsters could spot her, and moved towards the next herb.

  This one had a similar time window for her to gather it, and so she navigated around the vision cones carefully, waiting for just the right moment before she darted in. The opportunity window opened and she wheeled herself in, wasting no time to initiate the gathering animation. Eight painful seconds later, she scooted out to safety and closed in on the final objective.

  The game had, for whatever reason, put this one inside of a tree. Tanisha had to sidle up to it from an angle and roll herself around the tree until she found a point at which she could reach it to begin the gathering animat—

  The EULA has been updated! a popup said, filling her screen and causing Tanisha to cry out. Please review it below and select “I Accept” to continue into dARkness: Online!

  Tanisha stared at the popup for only a moment. Firstly, it was odd that it was happening now, while she was already in the game, instead of as she logged in. But secondly, and most importantly, she could see the game behind the popup. It was still running. And the nearest crabstrosity was still moving.

  The popup hadn’t paused the game.

  In moments, an enemy would spot her and attack.

  Chapter 6

  It only took Tanisha a moment to justify the EULA update. In theory, it made sense. If DeKR pushed out a patch to fix the drop rate, it wasn’t out of the question that they could push other updates with it, especially if they needed a change to the EULA to cover themselves against anyone who might be mad about missing the boat on the bug.

  And EULA updates weren’t like the other pop-ups in the game. They only happened when you opened the app, and not during combat. The game didn’t know it needed to pause.

  But Tanisha hadn’t closed and reloaded the app. How could an update be pushed to a program while it was still running?

  She didn’t know if such a thing was possible from a technical perspective.

  Regardless, this was real life and she’d have to deal with it.

  Tanisha sighed. At best, this was just a weird bug of the wrong notification type being pushed in the wrong way. At worst, it was predatory. She couldn’t afford to sit here and scan the EULA for updates while in the middle of the eve
nt.

  DeKR had never issued a problematic EULA update, but just because it hadn’t happened in dARkness didn’t mean it never happened. Six-ish months ago, there had been a news story about a game called Treasure HuntAR that went around every AR game’s community. The developers had apparently used the player’s name and likenesses for advertising without permission. It was in the EULA, so they thought they were covered. The resulting fines, fees, and bad press had caused the game to dry up. It was unlikely another company would do the same thing.

  But it was also possible they would do something equally as unacceptable.

  Corporate America always tried.

  Tanisha wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t have the time to skim the EULA for details of the changes. Not that anyone ever really had the time to read the pages upon pages of super boring text included in every game ever, but she couldn’t even skim the heading titles for anything that literally said: “here’s the bit where we talk about invading your privacy.”

  Instead, she had to jam on the accept button. The popup faded, and Tanisha started mashing the space where she knew the prompt for the gathering node would be. She would just barely have enough time to gather it before the nearest crabstrosity patrolled around to spot her. Equipping the machete was the smartest thing she’d done. It’s speed boost would be the difference between her making it, or failing the event.

  “Come on, come on…” As soon as the progress bar on the gathering finished, Tanisha slapped both hands to the wheels of her chair and scooted back, nearly overbalancing and falling. She managed to catch herself. Her heart was racing, filling her ears with its whooshing beat.

  “Shit! Go, go, go!” she shouted under her breath. Tanisha barely managed to dart to safety, only saved from failure by the stealth bonus on her armor. She turned to watch the nearest crabstrosity’s vision cone pass within mere centimeters of her.

  The progress bar for the event filled up the rest of the way, and the text faded out. In its place, the final objective was highlighted. She just needed to get to safety to complete the event.