Tales of the Gemsmith - Chapter 01: A LitRPG Adventure Series (Aldaron Worlds) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Dean Winters, Awake

  Part 1: The Hospital, or: Real Life Sucks Chapter 1: 46 Hours Earlier…

  Chapter 2: VRM-Alpha!

  Chapter 3: You’d Make a Killing

  Chapter 4: Dangerous Environments

  Chapter 5: Enhanced Virtual Therapy

  Part 2: A Noob in Aldaron Chapter 6: Choose, Pilgrim

  Chapter 7: The Kobold & the Captain

  Chapter 8: Alice in Normal-land

  Chapter 9: Grum’s Challenge

  Chapter 10: The Lead

  Chapter 11: The Jodo Canyons

  Chapter 12: The Lady of Efen

  Chapter 13: Homeless in Two Cities

  Part 3: The Red Hand Interlude: Somewhere Very Far Away

  Chapter 14: The Jails of the Iron Halls

  Chapter 15: The Winter Stall

  Interlude II: The Stewards of Shardwick

  Chapter 16: Airborne

  Chapter 17: Shardwick Forest

  Chapter 18: The Real World, with a Thump

  Interlude III: The MicroBit

  Part 4: The Green Ouroborax Chapter 19: The Shrine of Oak

  Chapter 20: The Scroll Library

  Interlude IV: Red and Green

  Chapter 21: Reboot

  Chapter 22: Green Code

  Chapter 23: Real Life Reboot

  Chapter 24: Owlbears & Inpatients

  Chapter 25: Gargants & Game Logic

  Chapter 26: Hearth

  Chapter 27: The Gemsmith

  Epilogue: Dean Winters, Alive

  Winters’ End Character Sheet

  Tales of the Gemsmith

  -Chapter 01: Immersion-

  A LitRPG Adventure Series

  By Jared Mandani

  Tales of the Gemsmith is © 2018 by Jared Mandani

  Cover Art by Alberto Besi

  This book is a work of fiction, and any similarity to persons, institutions, or places living, dead, or otherwise still shambling is entirely coincidental.

  Dear reader, I would like to thank you for purchasing this book, and helping out the author! If you would like to hear more of what I am up to, or continue to follow the stories set in this world, with these characters, then please take a look at:

  http://litrpgfreaks.com

  Thanks again! Don’t forget to leave feedback!

  Prologue: Dean Winters, Awake

  The light that tracked Dean’s heartrate blinked on and off, a steady, staccato rhythm that was at least reassuring, he thought – given his current circumstances.

  Dean Winters was awake and lying in a hospital bed at the San Maria General Hospital Intensive Care Unit. His body hurt in ways that he hadn’t even thought possible just a few scant hours ago. His room was mostly dark, save for the subdued lights of the machines and the bed lights. A barred window showed the muted blues and grays of the San Maria skyline, washed in electric blurs of streetlights.

  Has it really only been a few hours? Time felt lumpy and disconnected in his mind, as he tried to piece together the events of last night. He remembered flashes of glaring light in his eyes, which he now knew were the strip bulbs of the hospital corridors as they flashed past above his gurney. He remembered worried-looking faces wearing green and blue scrubs as they leaned over him. Murmured voices that he couldn’t make out, and then—?

  “He’s awake,” a voice said in the room, and Dean managed to move his head to see a nurse with red hair scraped back into a severe bun and black-rimmed glasses. He thought he recognized her from somewhere, and in his mind a name hovered into view. Marcy. But how did he know her name?

  “Good. Mr. Winters?” A shadow coalesced from behind the nurse, and sharpened into the shape of a heavyset man in a white shirt, black tie, and an old, tired sports jacket. He had the squarish jaw and crewcut of someone who did very serious work for a living.

  “Hgnmh?” Winters managed to grumble, before coughing. His voice felt raw and unused, and the nurse – Margery? – rushed to his side to tip a plastic tumbler of water to his lips. Her hands were pale and smelled like coconut, Dean noted as he spluttered, drank, and nodded his thanks.

  “Mr. Dean Winters, of Apartment 27b, Willis Building, Jefferson Avenue?” the man asked.

  Another nod from Dean.

  “I’m Detective Abrams, San Maria Serious Crime Unit, and I’ve come to talk to you about the break-in.”

  Part 1: The Hospital, or: Real Life Sucks

  Chapter 1: 46 Hours Earlier…

  “A wave of mutilation. A wave of mutilation. A wave of…” The music of the Pixies blared out from Dean’s desktop speaker as he worked, hunched over his bench in the darkened room.

  If anyone else were to come into the room right now, they would have seen a thin, harried sort of man with tangled but short hair in all-black clothes. He needed the black because otherwise he would never be able to see the gemstone fragments and crystal dust that his work produced. His eyes were focused to bright spots through their magnifying goggles, and his hands were gloved in the special black neoprene fabric that felt like a second skin. The Pixies could have been doing a rendition of “Barbie Girl” or Bob Dylan for all that the young man, in this moment, knew or cared.

  The bench in front of him was the regulation stainless-steel, with bright spotlights angled onto the forest of clamps and vices in front of his eyes. Everywhere else in the room was dark; the locked metal cabinets, the locked glass case, the stand of aprons. The light was so bright that it would have blinded him if he hadn’t been wearing his special goggles – but Dean didn’t care.

  On the end of the nearest clamp at which he peered was a gemstone – well, not yet a gemstone. It was a hunk of rock roughly the size of a thumbnail, colored a dirty off-yellow at which he scraped and drew across his fine diamond-cutting saw. The device was no bigger than a large fountain pen, but attached to heavy cables and to the generator unit at his feet. Dean leaned on a pedal to make the small saw whine.

  Scrape. Another chunk fell off to the steel below, and Dean felt that familiar zing of satisfaction every time he cut away some of the impurities that hid the crystal inside.

  It’s all about finding the weakness, the flaws, cutting them away… he told himself once again, a mantra that soothed his mind as he peered with his magnified vision. Through the goggles, the sharp and jagged confines of the crystalline structure suddenly bloomed into view. It was breathtakingly beautiful to the young man’s eyes. He could make out dips and crevasses, mountains and spurs of rock as if he were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

  No one knows the world that’s hidden down here, right before their eyes! he thought, selecting one of the geometric canyons to tap with the diamond-tipped blade of the saw. There was the smallest of flashes, a chink as another fault line opened and a piece of rock fell to the floor, revealing one gleaming crystal side, blushed with a faint bluish radiance.

  “Okay then, girl, okay…” Dean breathed, settling himself back in his chair and taking his foot off the saw pedal as he let his heartrate settle down. You had to take your time with this work. You had to go slowly, ever so slowly if you wanted to get it right.

  Thud. There was a sound from outside his room, like the thunk of something hitting the emergency shutters. Again.

  “If those kids out there…” Dean growled, his good mood soured by the memory of the outside world. Dean was a quiet sort of guy. He didn’t like stress, he didn’t like distractions. He liked precision and
intricacy, and he found that people, on the whole, were always erratic, random, and messy.

  Which was why his current shopfront, down near the noisy front of the San Maria bay—with a tattooists’ right next door and a luxury sporting goods (fishing equipment) on the other side—could have made him weep in frustration. He wallowed in self-pity for the briefest of moments: this wasn’t where his work was supposed to be, but since art school and then technical college after that, all he could afford was this shabby store near the front of the bay. But it had metal shutters, and it had a big back room that he had spent the bulk of his money converting into a workspace.

  “I should be up in Expedite Heights the man thought dismally. That was the elite district of San Maria, filled with museums and theatres, rich restaurants and artisanal crafters such as himself. Up there, the sorts of foot traffic that might wander into Winters Jewels wore fur coats and drove Ferraris or BMWs. Down here he would be lucky if they even owned a trail bike.

  Thud. Another bang on the shutters outside, past his work room, and past his storefront with its glass cabinets. It’s probably the kids again, out drinking cheap beer and running around.

  Dean sighed, knowing that he couldn’t return to work now. Gem-cutting and jewel-smithing was a precise art. He had to be incredibly exact with every movement, and he felt way too uptight right now. No. Instead, he would clean up the fragments using a special machine that could pound and crush them further, and then he could either use the dust fragments in his work, or he could sell them on to industrial bidders.

  “If I ever get enough, that is…” Dean moved back on his swivel chair, turning to inspect the glass cabinet of his latest work. In it hung his most experimental pieces – the ones that he didn’t dare put out on show. Gold and silver necklaces and rings made of fine, twining threads of precious metal, holding delicate gemstones in their hearts like stars.

  “It’s like elf jewelry,” he remembered one of his friends, Paul, saying when he had shown it to him. Paul would say that – he had taken Dean to the Lord of the Rings release when it had come out, saying that he “needed to get out of his hovel sooner or later.”

  It had been a good trip, he had to admit. He had loved the light and the action, and the way that the drama had felt tragic and noble at the same time. It was the sort of feeling that he wanted to evoke with his own jewelry.

  “Like my pieces come from a different time. A different world…” he breathed.

  Crash.

  The sound that made him jump, however, was definitely not from another world. It was the sound of this world, and more specifically, the sound of glass shattering.

  “Those kids!” Dean jumped to his feet, tripping over the pipes by the desk and almost falling onto his own work desk. “Damn it!” He wrenched off the goggles and blinked in the bright lights, turning to hit the automatic lock on the door and barge out. A moment before the door slid open, he thought to grab the only weapon he had in here.

  Dean Winters went out to face the ‘kids’ armed only with a mop.

  *

  “A mop, you say?” Detective Abrams frowned. Even though it was gloomy here in his hospital room, the detective’s face was half-illuminated by the flashes of the green and blue lights from Dean’s monitor. He looked like a robot. Dean wondered if he could detect a shudder of humor coming from the police officer, now perched at the end of his bed and scribbling words onto a small spiral-wound notepad.

  “A mop.” Dean nodded, feeling the crick in his neck only getting worse. Not that I’d have been able to do anything if I’d had an actual weapon… He had been an art student. What did he know about fighting?

  “And can you describe the men who broke in for me, sir…?” Detective Abrams quizzed.

  Dean licked his lips, remembering that moment when the chill panic had slid down his spine as he realized that no, the people standing in front of him with his smashed store-front window behind were not teenagers or young people. Like himself, actually, they wore a lot of black.

  But unlike Dean Winters, they also wore balaclavas.

  *

  Forty-six hours earlier, and Dean was jolted into silence by what he now saw. At least three heavy-set men wearing black combat fatigues and balaclavas. At their feet stood the shattered remains and shards of the store window, and behind them the metal shutters had been raised somehow to halfway up the window.

  They’re burglars half of Dean’s brain thought, only it was too shocked to catch up with the rest of his brain.

  “Uh, hello?” he heard himself squeak and then wondered why in the name of anything that was holy had he said that? What are you supposed to do when you’re being robbed blind? His thoughts raced in time with his heart. Weren’t you supposed to keep them talking? Or was that what you did with suicidal people? Dean didn’t know and wished that someone had told him.

  Press the panic button.

  I haven’t got a panic button – I haven’t got the money to install one!

  “Get him!” the smallest, nearest, but also the widest of the burglars shouted, and the two taller criminals jumped over the nearest glass cabinet towards him.

  Crap. Dean half-raised the mop, at the same time as he half-turned to try and run back into his little workroom. At least that door had an automatic lock, if he could just—

  “Agh!” Dean tripped over the long handle of the broom, falling backwards into his work area and hearing the low, mechanical hiss as the automatic door started sliding across the opening and two large black shapes scrabbled to get to him.

  I can hide in here until they’re gone… He started to crab backwards. The door moved with frustrating slowness.

  “Oi! Come here!” Just before the door slid closed, a lump of metal crossed the frame and jammed it. A crowbar, and it was being held on the other end by one of the burglars.

  “No!” Dean looked on in horror, wondering if he was brave enough to try and kick it out. There were angry shadows passing the strip of door jamb, trying to lever it open.

  “He might have a phone in there!” the leader of the group said.

  I do, he remembered, lunging for his aprons where his smartphone would be sitting in one of the pockets.

  CREAK! A protesting squeal of metal as they added a further crowbar and now a hammer to the small slit of space that separated them. Dean kicked at the door, trying to dislodge their tools.

  “Get out of here! It’s my life’s work!” he shouted.

  “Yeah, and this is mine!” someone grunted. There was a sudden groan of gears as the door was wrenched back. A hiss and a fizz of popping electrical gears sounded from somewhere in the wall. Dean had just managed to find the smooth, white surface of his phone, raised it to the light—

  And that was when something hit him. Hard.

  *

  “So – you fought back?”

  Back in the present of the hospital room, the detective managed to look surprised as he considered the broken form of the jewel-smith in front of him. Dean blinked. He wasn’t particularly sure what he had done after that. The criminals had been armed with crowbars and hammers, and he had a mop and an iPhone. Not the best way to start a fight.

  “Normally,” Detective Abrams continued, “we don’t advise that victims fight back. Most criminals are motivated by greed alone, and will be happy to leave their victims unharmed if they can get away with a profit.”

  “Not these guys,” Dean said through lips that were still discolored and cracked from where his face had been hit. Thankfully, only with the man’s knuckles.

  Dean didn’t remember much of what followed then, and if the detective wanted to think of it as a ‘fight’ then Dean suspected that he was probably severely overestimating his abilities. He remembered falling to the floor as hands had seized his legs, and he remembered kicking out, hearing a grunt and an annoyed shout as the boots of his other attackers found his body. At some point in the fracas, he had managed to kick the chair between
them, half-climbing one of the desks as one of them had hit his back and legs with something very heavy and very painful.

  And then…

  Dean looked down at his bandaged hand. His bandaged right hand, which was also his lead hand. Paul would be impressed, he thought glumly as he looked at the thing that belonged in some science fiction movie. It hurt, and it was splayed out like a fan encased in thick white bandages. However, splints pierced the white fan, holding his broken fingers in place, and a thick cuff sat around his wrist where several of the bones inside there, too, had been cracked.

  “It’ll heal, Dean,” the nurse, Marcy, murmured, patting his shoulder a little. Dean smiled at her. She was kind, he knew, although he also couldn’t remember why he thought that. “It’ll take a while, and you will need lots of intensive physiotherapy, but it will heal…”

  Dean’s smile faded. Physiotherapy. Months taken from his work, months during which he would have to find some way to pay the pills, repair the shop, re-stock his supplies…

  It’s all just so useless… He felt a huge wave of despair crash over him. It was like the burglars had targeted his right hand as they had repeatedly stamped on it. Like they were teaching him a lesson for daring to defy them.

  “And at some point during this fight, one of them threw you against the wall?” Abrams sought to confirm an earlier rendition of the story that Dean also did not remember giving.

  “I think so.” Dean nodded. He had been in too much agony by then from his broken hand and leg to think clearly. But there had been bright, flashing lights as the edge of the metal table swam up towards him, and then blackness. Nothing but flashes of vision and sound before now. He told this to the detective, who only nodded with an annoyed look on his face.

  “So, you can’t remember any defining features of these attackers? An accent? A tattoo? An article of clothing?” Abrams rubbed a hand over the bridge of his nose as his face flashed blue, green, blue, green in the light of the medical machines.