DLC: A LitRPG Adventure (Beta Tester Book 4) Read online

  But jutting out from beneath Meg’s box sat a piece of yellowed parchment, somehow undamaged by the falling snow and wind.

  Jack picked it up, and an alert flashed through his thoughts.

  Pleasant Vale map acquired.

  At the same time, the game informed him that the Trouble in Pleasant Vale quest had been updated.

  You’ve discovered a map of homes in the area, marked with names that correspond to those listed on the strange boxes. The old man must have been some manner of delivery driver.

  Objective complete: Investigate the sleigh

  Objective added: finish the dead man’s deliveries [optional]

  Jack snorted. That was precisely the piddly kind of nonsense he had no intention of getting mixed up with unless he absolutely had to. And since the game had marked the objective optional, he’d be opting out of playing the videogame version of Uber Eats or whatever this was. Thanks very much.

  He returned to the reindeer, freeing them like he’d planned, one after another. The animals bounded off into the whipping snow. For half a second, just as they disappeared into the gray, Jack thought he saw one of them leap high into the air like a bird taking flight.

  Then, he shook his head. Of course he hadn’t. That would be impossible. “Come on,” he told his crew, “let’s go find this town.”

  They trudged back toward the path, and Jack studied his map as he went. As near as he could tell, Pleasant Vale was a medium-sized valley nestled between mountains. He saw a few dozen homes listed, most with bright golden stars beside them. A few had dark, splotchy marks by the names, like the cartographer had dropped a glob of ink while working. There was an Eben on Bowley Lane, right by Marley Way, with a splotch by his name, and a Joseph on Jeddler Street, and so on. Fewer than the stars but more numerous than the blotches were the buildings with no marks at all. These, Jack quickly determined, were the commercial sites. He saw a place called “Snowy Timber Lodge” in the center of town, and another just outside of town marked as “Alpine Resort.” There were shops, too: “Gretel’s Sweets,” and “Hans’s Toys,” and so on. Of more interest to him, of course, were the ones that promised to sell things he might need. So he made note of “Holly’s Alchemic Emporium,” and “Claus’s Armor Shop,” and half a dozen other shops.

  By now, he’d reached the cobblestone road. He slipped his map into his pack and looked around to get his bearings. Then, pointing in the direction they’d been heading, he said, “This way.”

  They took two steps when a translucent figure materialized in front of them. Jack yelped. It was the old man they’d found in the snow, and though the snow and ice had melted from his features, he remained the same bluish gray color. Only now, Jack could see right through him. “What the sugar cookies?”

  “Good tidings to you, traveler,” the old man said. The timbre of his voice filled Jack with a sense of calm and warmth.

  “Uh…you too. Are you…a ghost?”

  Karag, meanwhile, swatted the apparition. “Begone, demon.”

  And Arath yelped and loosed an arrow at the old man’s head. The arrow passed through harmlessly a moment before the giant’s hand did the same.

  The specter stood there, unmoved. “Be not alarmed, my friends: my time here is not now long, and I am no threat to you.

  “I am, as you know already, dead – killed, by the solstice demon. My time here is done, but my task, alas, is not.”

  Jack was about to remark that that was rough, but the old man didn’t pause long enough for him to say anything at all. “If there is to be peace on earth and joy to all, it must be completed before the twelfth day ends.”

  Jack sighed. There it is, then. “What’s the job, Gramps?”

  The old man gestured toward his overturned sleigh. “My deliveries must be made. I have gifts for all the good people of the village – and coal for the wicked.”

  Jack stared at the old man, at his strange, winter get up, and then at the sleigh full of gifts. He remembered all the weirdly festive things his companions had been saying since they’d reached the island. And, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he asked, “Wait a minute…are you supposed to be…Santa Claus?”

  The old man stared blankly at him. “I do not know the name. But no.”

  Jack breathed out a long sigh of relief. “Thank good –”

  “I am Father Winter. Or I was, until Krampus murdered me. And it was my job to bring cheer to all the island.”

  Jack groaned. “Speak to supervisor.”

  The game paused suddenly. Father Winter stood fixed in place, an unmoving, ghastly blue apparition. Everyone else froze, too: Karag, Shimmerfax, the whole lot of them. The whole, that was, but Migli. The dwarf spun around and grinned at him. “Yo, Jack, what’s up my…sugar my plums. Where are you?”

  Jack cringed, as much at the turn of phrase as the recognition of the tech who’d answered his summons. This would be Richard, the intern assigned to watch him for half the day. Speak to supervisor was a command programmed into the virtual reality experience to ping whatever monitoring technician happened to be on duty at the time. Migli was the game’s supervisor interface. The NPC avatar would temporarily become a playable character for the on-call tech, who would control it via a VR headset, or even a mouse and keyboard.

  Right now, Jack was counting it as his bad luck that he got Richard. It wasn’t that he disliked the young man, exactly. He was annoying, sure, but not a bad guy. But he wasn’t Jordan, either. Jordan Knight was the daytime tech during the week. And she was both more insightful and less obnoxious than the intern.

  Still, he tried not to sound disappointed as he answered. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”

  “It looks like…no way. How the heck’d you even get here?”

  “Looks like what? Where am I?”

  “How’d you get here?” Richard repeated. “That’s not supposed to be possible.”

  “I have no idea. I just went to sleep, and when I woke up, here we were. Well, not here exactly. The raft got stuck in the ice and we walked from the shore.” He shook his head to clear his jumbled thoughts. “But what exactly is ‘here’ anyway? Is this like some kind of weird Christmas Easter egg or something?” He knew it sounded strange, all jumbled together like that. But he figured this must be some kind of Christmas themed fluke, or hidden level – an Easter egg – the developers had added. And, somehow, he’d stumbled into it.

  Richard stared. “It’s not an Easter egg, man. It’s a whole DLC pack.”

  Jack blinked at him. A DLC – downloadable content – pack would be an add-on that gamers could buy after the game released. Apparently, this was a holiday themed one. He wasn’t surprised that Marshfield Studio had already built it before they even released the game. DLC was big money – more than the base game, nowadays – and studios didn’t want to miss the opportunity to cash in on holidays or anything else.

  But he wasn’t testing the DLC. If things had gone according to plan, maybe he would have, eventually. The time for maybes and eventually’s had come and gone, though. “Okay. But what am I doing in a DLC pack?”

  “That’s a great question.”

  Jack folded his arms. “Yes, it is. For you, Richard. Since you’re the testing supervisor…”

  “Cool your cocoa,” Richard said. Then, he pulled a face. “What the heck was that?”

  “Seems to be a feature of the DLC: everyone’s walking around spouting off stupid winter and Christmas themed swears now.”

  “Ugh. That’s annoying.”

  “Uh…yeah. So is being stuck on Christmas island, instead of getting out of this stupid game.”

  Richard again advised him to be patient, saying he was looking through the logs. This went on for a good four or five minutes. The silence was only broken by Jack’s impatient demands for updates, and Richard’s occasional hmm or that’s not good. He repeated it like people would distractedly drop, “huh”: unconsciously, and frequently.

  Which, of co
urse, only added to Jack’s annoyance. He’d already dealt with one catastrophic bug in the game. He didn’t want to find himself permanently relegated to some kind of second rate, peppermint flavored hell.

  Finally, the intern let out a loud sigh. “Okay, well, I’m not a hundred percent sure what happened here. But I think I know.”

  “What?”

  “So it looks like the dev team had scheduled this roll out months ago. I guess they must have figured we’d be further in testing and all. They didn’t plan on you getting stuck in there.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t really on my agenda either…”

  “Anyway, it looks like it was set on some kind of automatic timer. You know, roll out at midnight. Well, tonight was the midnight in question.”

  Jack groaned. “Great.”

  “Yeah. I got to run this by the dev team to verify…but it looks like that’s what happened.” Then, he paused. “No, actually, I take it back: it rolled out last night. Hm…but that doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t you have seen it before? Let me check something…well, that’s not good.” Richard fell back into the same muttering as before for another few minutes. Finally, he said, “It looks like there’s some kind of trigger. You have to be at sea or in the air, so the game can hijack you here. It waits until you wait in-game. Did you wait?”

  “No,” Jack said. Then, he remembered, “I did sleep, though.” Sleeping passed time in-game, as well as restored a character’s health meter. Since they had a long journey ahead of him, and since he needed actual sleep – not just in-game sleep – Jack had coordinated his real nap with his in-game nap. “Could that do it?”

  “Definitely. I mean, I do have to run it by Nate and the guys when they get in, but I’m guessing that’s what happened.”

  Nate was one of the developers – and one of Jack’s least favorite Marshfield Studio employees. “You know what, I don’t even care how I got here. All I need to know is how I get the heck off this island and back to the main quest.”

  “You know, I don’t know.”

  Jack groaned again and started to let into Richard. He wanted to know how he could possibly not know. That was his job, wasn’t it?

  Richard endured for a moment, but finally interrupted. “Dude, I only play what they let me play. I’m the intern, remember? I haven’t got a chance to touch the DLC’s yet.”

  Jack scowled at him, or rather, at the blocky, three-foot-tall avatar he’d assumed. But he said nothing.

  Richard shrugged. “I don’t know how you get off the island. But looking at your objectives, my guess is, if you finish the quest – you know, the ‘Trouble in Happy Valley’ one –”

  “Vale,” he corrected.

  “Whatever. Finish the quest, and you’ll find a way off the island. That’s my guess.”

  “I don’t want to finish the quest. And what if you’re wrong?”

  “I told you, when the dev team is in, I’ll talk to them. But in the meantime, that’s the best I can do.”

  “It’s not much.”

  The dwarf just rolled his massive shoulders again. “Anything else?”

  Jack shook his head. He knew, ultimately, none of this was Richard’s fault. And as much as he wanted to hold someone accountable, the intern was just about the last person to blame. So he let Richard sign off.

  The game sprang back to life. Migli’s NPC persona took over. The wind picked up again, howling like mad. Father Winter resumed his spiel too, going on about the joy and holiday spirit his gifts would bring. Then, he got to the ask. “Unless I find someone to fill in in my absence, Krampus’s gloom will spread and holiday cheer will forever be lost.

  “Will you, Adventurer, pick up the mantle of Father Winter, and deliver the gifts to all the good residents of Pleasant Vale?”

  Three predetermined responses ran through Jack’s mind, of which he could choose only one:

  By my oath, of course I will, Father Winter. We cannot let Krampus’s evil plan come to fruition. We cannot see the sunshine of Pleasant Vale forever lost.

  What’s in it for me, White Whiskers?

  And,

  Holiday cheer? Have you seen this place, old man? Find some other fool. I’m not interested.

  The first choice was far too exuberant for Jack, and the third, though it mirrored his feelings on the matter, seemed to run contrary to Richard’s advice. So he chose the second option, wondering, a bit rudely, how he stood to profit from the venture.

  Father Winter smiled benevolently. “You will gain the gift of bringing joy. You will know that you have spread holiday cheer to all the deserving homes in Pleasant Vale.”

  Two new dialogue options became available.

  I will gladly do so, Father Winter. Good tidings to one and all!

  And,

  Sorry, I don’t work for free.

  Father Winter’s answer had soured Jack’s mood until it overshadowed Richard’s advice. He chose the second option and turned the job down.

  Father Winter nodded slowly and sadly. “I’m sorry to hear it. But if you change your mind, seek out Estelle, the overseer of my workshops. She will tell you what you need to know.”

  Then, the apparition vanished. “Well done,” Karag said. “We don’t need to be getting mixed up with the evil magic of this place.”

  “We don’t need to be playing errand boy to dead guys,” Arath nodded.

  Er’c and Ceinwen said nothing, though both seemed troubled by the development. Migli took to singing about ground frozen hard as iron.

  Chapter Three

  They reached the town of Pleasant Vale an hour later. Jack knew, because there was a huge wooden sign on the outskirts of the town, painted in crisp, white letters in an inviting font that read, “Pleasant Vale.” A striped red and white border, reminiscent of a candy cane, surrounded the sign.

  And behind it sat a picturesque little village full of fairytale cottages and gingerbread houses. Jack groaned out loud at the sight of iced roofs and festive gummy walks, with Christmas trees on every street corner. Ornate wreaths hung from old fashioned gas powered streetlamps, and men and women bustled in and out of homes and shops that looked like they’d been pulled straight off the Candy Land board game. “What in the sugar-coated heck is this place?”

  It had been a protest rather than an actual demand for an answer, but Migli obliged anyway. “I believe this must be Pleasant Vale, Sir Jack.”

  “No kidding. What gave it away? The big sign that says, ‘Pleasant Vale’?”

  He trudged onward, down a wide cobblestone street that ran through the heart of town, appropriately named Main Street. Side streets intersected with it. Some of them, he recognized from the addresses on the packages. He saw Marley Way and Tackleton Road, and a dozen others he didn’t recognize. Behind gingerbread homes with icing shutters and gum drop accents, he saw other lanes and streets and alleys, and more homes and businesses.

  They passed red cheeked people bedecked in fur hats and shimmering capes. Most sent good tidings, or joyous tidings, or seasonal tidings their way as greeting. An old man, notably lacking both the festive colors and air, merely scowled at them. A few people watched Karag with concern, and scurried away, whispering to each other at the sight of him.

  For his part, the giant scowled at them all, murmuring more than once that this was an evil place. “Don’t let your guard down, my friends. There’s wicked magic here.”

  Jack ignored his companion, and the locals. The heavy-handed festive air already set his teeth on edge, and he felt a grinch-like spirit settling on him. He didn’t want to linger, lest it sour his mood once and for all. He set his steps for the mayor’s residence.

  It was a three-story gingerbread house in the center of town, with candy cane lintels and frosting icicles hanging from the roof. Chocolate reindeer statues stood guard at the door, and coconut snowmen decorated the yard. The smell of peppermint wafted through the air, mingling with the sound of festive music. From an upper balcony, someone was singing about jingle bells a
nd open sleighs.

  This, at last, did Jack’s mood in. He scowled at the sight and smell and sound of the place, and at the thought that he’d been somehow hijacked into this sickeningly sweet holiday nightmare.

  The doors opened, and a man in a green jacket and trousers and a red waistcoat stepped outside. “Greetings and good tidings to you, my friends, and welcome to Mayor Cristobal’s home. Come in, come in.”

  He gestured for them to follow him back inside, and popped steaming mugs of cocoa into their hands as soon as they did so. Despite himself, Jack couldn’t help but admit it looked good: a rich, chocolaty color dotted with floating holiday tree shaped marshmallows. The rim of the mug had been dipped in candy cane pieces, and a mix of chocolate and peppermint scents wafted up on the steam rising from it.

  “There,” the gaudily attired attendant declared in tones that boomed as loud and exuberantly inside as they had outside. “That’ll drive the chill away.” He flashed a brilliant white smile, and his teeth seemed to gleam all the brighter for the rosy pinkness of his cheeks.

  “We need to talk to the mayor,” Jack said.

  “Of course. I am Klaus – not the armorer. That’s my Uncle Claus.” He smiled again, in the same cheery way. “I am Cristobal’s…well, secretary, personal assistant, cocoa bearer. You name it.” He laughed at that.

  Jack didn’t. “Right. Well, we need to see this Cristobal.”

  “Of course. Tell me the nature of your business, and I will bring you to the mayor.” Here, for the first time, the other man’s good cheer broke, but only for a moment. It happened when he glanced at Karag. “I don’t suppose…well, you probably will want to go together?”