A New World (Gamer, Book 1) (5 page)

“
Gross. What the…?”

What happens next really throws him and makes
the NPC cry out in obscene pleasure.

“
Is that a head?”

He looks to the other player.

“
Yeap. 100% baby cow head,” she
says, watching Harry’s shocked face turn into one of complete
surprise.

What is going on?
He looks more closely
and notes even stranger things happening to the cow’s rear. There
seems to be a baby cow coming out from the rear of the momma cow
and it's all too realistic.

"My Sally is having a baby!” The NPC screams
in excitement that seems unwarranted in this sort of
situation.

He grabs Harry by the shoulders and looks deep
into his eyes. There is a startling intimacy as he says,
“YOU
MUST GIVE HER THE MEAT NOW!”

He doesn’t give Harry any time to answer as he
immediately follows his comment up by running around the barn like
a headless chicken and screaming
“MY SALLY, MY SALLY”
at the
top of his lungs.

Pulling out the pixilated red dripping meat,
he stands there waiting for the NPC to finishes his lap of the
barn, so he can grab hold of him and ask him what to do
next.

“
I DON’T KNOW! THE WORLD IS
ENDING! MY SALLY!!!”

“
Ok, that’s just silly. Answer me
properly.”

The NPC tears out of his grasp and begins
running around again.

“
Well, you’re no help,” Harry
says. “Any ideas, Axel?”

“
I’ll let you figure it out.
You’re going to love this.” Harry is not so sure. This doesn’t seem
very fun.

He takes the meat over to the cow and presents
it to the mouth of the cow, but it just moves away from him and
gives him a strange look.

Axel howls with laughter and slaps her
knee.

“
Other – oh my lord – end. Ah, too
funny… dying… no more.”

She falls to her knees and puts her hand over
her mouth, trying to hold back the tears as Harry goes around
back.

Rolling his eyes at both of them, he stops
around back and looks at that strangely rounded rear end of the
cow.

I guess there’s only one thing I
can do…

He holds the meat out to the small cow head
and it looks up at him with interest.

“
Come on, little one. I have
meat.”

The small beast takes a bite at the pig meat
and the NPC comes over to cheer.

"That's it!
HE’S COMING
OUT!"

Harry steps back, still holding the meat and
wondering how he got himself into this crazy situation, while at
the same trying his hardest to coax the calf to come forward a bit.
It is moving, but it's obviously not able to do so by
itself.

The NPC stops beside Harry and starts to
scream loudly that his Sally is being murdered by something. Harry
looks at him and finally realizes that he doesn’t really get what
is going on here. Sure, he has said Sally is having a baby, but,
for a farmer, he doesn’t seem to know how to birth a baby cow,
which is probably a reflection of whoever designed him’s knowledge
of this particular situation.

The farmer stops and starts puffing and
wheezing. There is an odd look in his eyes that speaks of the
bugginess to come if Harry doesn’t get his act together and sort
this problem out.

“
Do you want to give me any
clues?” he asks Axel, who has calmed down some.

“
Just do whatever comes naturally.
You’ll figure it out.”

“
Great,” Harry mumbles.
She’s
even less useful than the NPC.

He looks to the NPC who is screaming in a way
that sends a shiver down Harry’s spine and takes a calming breath.
Got to stay calm. This is only giving birth to a baby animal. I
studied this at 5 years old for humans. It should be much
different.

He comes forward more confident than he is and
uses the pieces of meat as mitts to hold the small cow’s head. He
then starts to yank in a very undoctor-like way on its head, trying
to pull the demon spawn out.

“
Come on, cow. It’s time to join
the rest of us poor souls in this hell called the
world.”

The cow gives him a look that says ‘I don’t
want to’, but Harry is determined. He keeps on pulling until two
small legs are revealed. It's not long before he is dragging the
thing out to fall back on the floor with the wet soggy calf sitting
on his naked skin. He rolls off to the side and, with the poorest
of bed side manners, pats the cow on the ass and watches in
amusement as the NPC stops screaming and grabs the small cow up in
his arms. He then rushes outside and Harry watches him go in
amusement, maybe this is what a happy parent feels when they have a
child. Harry is from a tube, so he doesn’t know much about that
feeling, but he would imagine it looked a lot like what just
happened.

He turns to the cow and finds here perfectly
pristine, even after just being given birth to. The mother cow moos
at him and walks past Harry with little concern that she has just
birthed a small animal.

“
I bet you’re thinking that all
this works out alright?” Axel says, watching Harry smiling in a
bemused way.

“
It gave birth, right? That’s the
end of the quest.”

Axel shakes her head.

“
It is the end of the quest for
sure, but it’s not the beginning you are imagining for that little
one.”

Harry stops smiling and looks at
her.

“
What do you mean?”

Axel sighs.

“
Sally gives birth several times a
day as newbies and oldsters come by to finish off this quest. Did
you see any other cows out there?”

“
No.”

“
Where do the baby cows
go?”

“
I don’t know.”

Axel sighs.

“
Ask me what flavor my sandwich
was?”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
Nope. Every day at the end of the
day he chops up little Sally’s young and makes sandwiches from
them.”

“
We have to stop him.”

Axel smiles sadly.

“
It’s a game, even if everything
feels just like the real world. I spent two days saving baby
Sallys. The young one’s fade away and the sandwiches appear without
the grisly work involved in producing the meat for them,” she says.
“There is nothing we can do.”

“
But I helped.”

“
You did,” she says seriously.
“How many people can say they saw a cow, let along helped birth
one?”

She picks up her sandwich from where she
placed it earlier and takes a bite.

“
It’s still not right.”

“
No, it’s not, but that’s the game
world. Not everything is as rosy colored as it looks,” she says.
“Still, it’s a kick being here, right? The real world is boring.
This is much more fun.”

She takes another bite.

“
Plus, I get paid as well. What
more could I ask?”

Harry sighs and watches her take another bite.
She is right about one thing and that is the real world is boring.
It’s half the reason why Harry is stuck testing this game. However,
she does seem very gung-ho. Dangerous and beautiful is a bad
combination in Harry’s not-so-experienced opinion.

“
Come on. Time to finish your
quest and I want to have another sandwich while it’s still
fresh.”

They walk outside to find the NPC stroking the
small cow in a very loving way. Axel walks over to him and slaps
him on the back.

“
Looks like you got some more
lunch meat, Chucky-boy. Happy to be Hannibal the Cannibal, are
you?”

The NPC ignores her and jumps to his feet to
dance around like a headless chicken as Harry
approaches.

He looks to Axel who shrugs.

"Don’t worry about it. You get used to this
type of silliness in the earlier levels. It only gets serious later
on.”

Harry nods and walks around with the NPC to
the front of his house where he starts whistling and cutting up
pumpkins, probably for a soup.

“
Excuse me?” Harry says, tapping
the man on the shoulder.

"Can I have my reward now?"

The NPC opens his mouth to reply with the
stock answer, but then he notes what Axel has somehow managed to
obtain while no one was looking.

"Someone is stealing my food!" Chuck howls,
his eyes burning a flaming red.

“
Oh dear, that’s not good,” Axel
says, hiding the food behind her back. “I think the birth of his
lunch and seeing his poor Sally stressed has got to him. I’m pretty
sure we should get running now!”

“
You think?”

Bug Detected! Danger!

“
Well, that just confirms it,”
Axel say, beginning to run.

Bug Detected! Danger!
The
words are so big that they cover most of Harry's vision. He looks
to the woman, who is already jogging away and decides she has got
the right idea.

They takes off around the house and jog around
the field. The NPC tears after them at full pace, only a few meters
behind and gaining. Harry is sprinting as fast as he can, but is so
weak at his low-level that he can’t get any ground on the
farmer.

“
FOOD STEALERS! COW KILLERS! YOU
ARE THE ONES KILLING MY SWEET SALLY’S BABIES.”

Harry looks back at the insane NPC and notes
that he now has a pitchfork that somehow has materialized in his
hands.

They do one lap of the field and then
another.

"What are you doing?" Harry yells at the woman
as she begins her third lap.

"They sometimes run out of steam after a
little bit and give up. Plus, my weapons are in the house and I
still want to finish my sandwich.”

Harry notes that she has the sandwich in her
hand and has been taking bites from it as she runs. She is clearly
a lot stronger than he is and it’s made even more obvious by how
she is barely breathing hard from the effort of keeping up the fast
pace that is causing Harry’s legs to burn in pain.

They come around the front of the house and
she ducks inside to grab her bow and quiver. She straps them on her
back as she runs and increases her pace as they finally head for
the forest.

Harry chases after her as fast as he can.
There are bears, pigs and other nasty creatures out here and he’s
not keen on facing them alone.

"Is he still coming?" Harry asks, not daring
to look back.

The woman glances over her shoulder and then
slows to a walk. Harry turns around and doesn't see the NPC chasing
them.

"That's quite a view you're offering there. I
should take a video."

Harry looks down and realizes that his green
dress has disappeared somehow during his run. He closes his legs
and blushes bright red at the attention. The woman looks amused and
goes to sit down against a tree, pulling out a long pipe, which
automatically begin smoking as she puts it to her lips.

"You want a puff?" she asks.

Harry takes the slim brown piece of wood and
takes a few pulls. It tastes pretty much like normal tobacco and
he’s quite surprised at how similar it is to the real
thing.

"I take it this is your first time playing a
game like this," she says.

"How can you tell?"

"You’re naked in the middle of the forest
after doing a trash quest, which is worth virtually
nothing.”

She opens her quest book and flicks through
the pages until she reaches a section marked completed. Axel points
to the bottom of the quest entry for
Saving Sally
and Harry
groans. He should really have checked the quest description
carefully before he bothered to kill all those pigs. The reward is
only one copper and a ‘beef’ sandwich, which the woman has already
stolen a few times over.

“
That sucks.”

“
Doesn’t it? The Sally sandwich
isn’t really that good either. No toppings and all.”

Harry sighs.

"I guess it hasn’t really been a good day for
me. It looks like I’ve got a lot to learn."

The woman gives him an amused look and makes a
few little gestures in the air.

"Harry O'Neil, unemployed, credit rating
-200,522, apartment rent unpaid for three weeks now. Oh, and deep
in debt to the government in the worst of ways. Basically, a normal
guy and perfect fodder for the game.”

She yanks a piece of paper from the air and
lets it fall in front of Harry. It's a list of his gambling debts
and exactly who he owes money to. The number at the bottom is
exactly the amount that he can get if he fulfills his testing
contract with a hefty gold bonus. It’s not a low number and it
makes Harry a little ill at what they are going to do with him if
he doesn’t pay up in three days time.

"How did you do that? This is all of my
personal information."