Chapter 1 recap: Jen Jacobs discovers the Quest Board, a mysterious online repository of seemingly real-world Quests. Catch up on past chapters below or read on to chapter 2.
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 actually. 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.
“Macallan 12, neat,” he said, gesturing to the drink.
I locked eyes with him and then at the drink, before picking it up and swirling the brown liquid around counterclockwise.
“Trying to see if I poisoned you?”
I stopped the glass, the scotch cresting against the side and spilling slightly over the breech.
“No, just pondering why I am here, in this bar, contemplating a sip of a scotch that I absolutely hate, with you, who seemed more interested in doing due diligence on what’s underneath my sweater. Honestly, did you spend your entire time at RPGLab staring at me?”
I put the glass down and slid it toward the bar, waving over the bartender.
“Laphroaig 25, on the rocks, and put it on his tab, please.”
The bartender obliged, and a few moments later, I sipped my new cold scotch.
“You know,” said Duncan with a grin, “it’s rude to drink without cheers-ing first.”
I stared at him, debating whether to chew him out again or to go along with the banter. I chose the latter.
“You’re right, how rude of me. What should we toast to?”
Duncan thought for a minute before he raised his glass towards mine.
“To not missing out on a promising investment,” he said.
Our glasses clinked and I took a sip. The whiskey burned my throat as it went down, enough to make me forget for a second Duncan’s second lame attempt at a pick-up line. I began to reply and that was when a cab drove right through a huge puddle behind me, the resulting wake drenching me from head to toe.
I was still outside the bar. Duncan, inside.
Our conversation: within the confines of my head.
I had not actually gone in, but had stopped to look through the window of the bar, trying to work up the courage to walk in and make the bold entrance that had just played out in my mind.
Duncan turned toward the window and I darted out of his view. Whatever courage remained had been washed away by the dirty rain water wave. And so I retreated.
The next day, I was in the middle of debugging the new inventory APIs when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I swiveled to see Duncan, who had grabbed a chair and was sitting directly behind me. I yelped.
“W-what are you doing here?” I stammered out. “Don’t you know it’s rude to sneak up on someone?”
Duncan chuckled.
“And don’t you know it’s rude to stand someone up? I had to cook up a really good explanation for my boss as to why I couldn’t take the early flight out this morning.”
I stood up and stared down at Duncan, trying to gain control by talking down to him as so many men had done to me.
“It doesn’t count as standing someone up if the invitation was unsolicited and not accepted. You’re the one who chose to wait there, not knowing if I was going to come. Which I couldn’t, because I was here last night until 12:30 making up the work I could have been doing if we didn’t have to spend three days getting a build ready for you and Bret. For all the good that did anyway, seeing as how you’re more interested in me than my code.”
I cringed at that last line. Not only because it made me sound like a 16-year-old, but also because my boss would be furious if he found out I told off a potential investor.
There was a silence between us for only a few moments, but it dragged on for what seemed like ages. Then Duncan got up from his chair and we stood, facing each other eye to eye.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have presumed anything and it was wrong of me to come back here after you clearly weren’t interested in me.” His eyes shifted from mine to the floor, and then back again. I considered him again during this moment of vulnerability. He was cute in a used-to-be-dorky-in-high-school-but-then-became-an-investment-banker-sort-of-way. His dirty blond hair was an unkempt mess and I didn’t really like the sweater-vest/button-down combo he was rocking, but he had done what a lot of guys would never do: admit that he had made a mistake. I decided to relieve him of some of his guilt.
“Well,” I said. “You weren’t completely wrong.”
Our actual first date did not go down like I had imagined it. He insisted on buying me a proper dinner and we ended up closing the place down. Then, the next day, in what would be an annoying pattern that still persisted to this day, Duncan left town. He did come back, but never for more than a week or two at a time. He even convinced his boss to throw in a bit of money in the end. And so our relationship had proceeded at a glacial pace, despite it being a year and a half that we’d “officially” been together.
So he was not there when I (eventually) decided to confront the dragon. I took the leftovers from my fridge, grabbed the shovel from the lobby, and then waited in the alley for the beast to appear. It did, and my first attempts were not pretty. The rat was quicker than I expected, it ignored the food, and the super’s shovel was too heavy, so that every time I swung, the little bastard just scurried away. I discarded my coat for added mobility, leaving me in the alley with nothing but a ratty old t-shirt, but the increased speed was not enough. Eventually I just chucked the shovel blindly, hoping that the vermin wouldn’t expect a flying projectile attack, but the shovel just skirted harmlessly across the pavement. This Quest was going to get the best of me, it seemed.
I collapsed to the ground, exhausted. As I did though, the locket around my neck fell free from my t-shirt. It had been my mother’s and she had given it to me for my 11th birthday as my sole present. At the time I thought it was a pretty terrible gift, but now she was gone and I just had the locket.
That’s when it hit me. You couldn’t just give the dragon some crappy food and expect it to turn away so you could stab it in the back. No, it wanted something valuable, something special. And suddenly I realized what I had to do.
I unclasped the locket from around my neck and held it in my hands. It was silver, the size of a dollar coin, and the clasp had long since rusted over. I don’t remember if I opened it at the time my mother gave it to me and if I had, its contents were now lost in my memory along with the rest of my childhood.
The rat’s squeak interrupted my reminiscing and I refocused on the task at hand. It was now or never. I skipped the locket down the alley like a stone on a lake. The sound it made bouncing against the pavement made me cringe. Was this even worth it?
My opponent didn’t care about my moral crisis and finally emerged from the shadows. It studied the locket for a few seconds before deciding that it was more appetizing than the actual food offering I had made earlier and sunk its teeth into the silver.
With cat-like stealth, I crept along the alley walls to my discarded shovel, grabbed it in-stride, and with one last lunge brought the head down into the rodent’s flesh. It was over.
But not really. The rat corpse needed transporting, and there was the matter of retrieving my locket from the jaws of the dead creature. So I did what any normal 27-year old woman did on a Tuesday night: I stuck my hand in a rat’s mouth and pulled.
Next: Jen searches for answers and meets a surprising ally. Read it below, but first, a word from our sponsor, the ARC Worlds Guild.
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