Kieran

  Kieran took the extra few minutes to get Kaitlyn settled in her spot before getting back to his PC. He bundled her up in a blanket cocoon so thoroughly that he had to help her sit up a few times when she fell over with laughter. But once she was in place on the couch in the study with the TV on, he patted her blanket-covered head and moved back over to his overly expensive computer chair.

  Mag Mell was still up and running, with Caoimhe crouched down and drawing with her finger on the ground - one of the idle animations that the game cycled through while he was AFK. He took a few deep breaths and stretched out a bit to get the blood flowing.

  Falling asleep on the couch had not exactly left him feeling great. He hadn’t really been tired before the nap, but now he felt groggy. When he got his headset back on and clicked into the voice chat, he was immediately met with a chorus of voices.

  “Caoimhe…” They said, in unison, sounding like a disappointed parent. There was absolutely no way they hadn’t planned that response, and Kieran rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He sighed. “I’m back. Let’s hear it.”

  “Old man needed a midday nap?” Evan joked.

  “Next time, set an alarm?” Nyx prodded.

  Several other jokes followed, but rather than taking turns, everyone just shouted over one another. The noise all came out jumbled through the headphone speakers. And not for the first time, Kieran wished headphones could actually separate audio layers so he could actually hear them all.

  “Did Kat enjoy the nap?” Marissa asked, once everyone had finished talking over each other.

  Kieran snorted. “She did. I’m sorry I’m late, everyone,” he said. “And Fiona, I don’t want to hear any shit from you. I give it two weeks before you either end up late because of a nap, or end up falling asleep during a raid, right in your chair.”

  “Hey! That’s not nice.” Evan said as Kieran got settled and prepared to continue.

  “So, what’s the plan?” He asked.

  “I guess we just hit up part two, right?” Jazz asked.

  “Yep.” Marissa said. “Like I said on the phone, we were just wasting time. But I think everyone is ready to go in, right?” There was a chorus of agreements in the chat, but as usual it was difficult to tell if everyone was there.

  “Drop R’s in chat.” Marissa said, and as requested everyone typed an R into the Party chat. Once all eight names popped up, they were ready to move.

  “Alright, let’s meet back up at the quest giver.” Ash said, and Kieran leaned back in his chair; he was already right there, so he just had to wait.

  In the meantime, he idly looked through his inventory and sorted it. Mag Mell gave you plenty of inventory space to work with, so having a completely full inventory wasn’t a particularly common occurrence. However, with all that space, the inventory windows had a very unfortunate tendency to end up messy and unorganized. And when you were looking for that one item among two hundred slots, it just got bad.

  Kieran had all kinds of random garbage in his inventory that he had picked up since the last time he had emptied his pockets. Plenty of enemies dropped random loot items that were virtually useless outside of very specific crafting recipes. And Mag Mell didn’t make you loot non-boss enemies manually, so all the junk just automatically ended up in his inventory.

  He skipped over to the nearest NPC vendor to sell all of the extra junk. It’s not like her would make useful amounts of gold from selling it all - just a pittance, really - but any gold was better than none if he just discarded it all.

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  The real trick was getting everything in order so he didn’t need to check every item manually. Thankfully, the automated sort function did some of the work, grouping items of the same type together - like the insane number of dyes he always carried - so some stuff could be safely ignored. But he still had to go through consumables carefully to get rid of the low level stuff, and then the same with the crafting materials.

  On the plus side, by the time he had sorted through everything, the party was basically ready to go.

  “Last call for the bathroom.” Kieran said out of habit as they gathered at the queueing point.

  “I’m all good, Dad.” Nyx snickered.

  Kieran shrugged and figured he’d lean into it. “Alright, but this is your last chance. We’re not stopping in ten minutes if you suddenly need to go.”

  There were some intermittent chuckles among the party, but he could also hear Kaitlyn giggling behind him. That, at least, made him smile.

  “Uh, actually, I’m gonna hit the bathroom before we go in.” Firo said.

  “You should probably use the bathroom, not hit it.” Evan said dryly. “That would hurt.”

  Firo simply ignored him, as the sounds of him taking off his headset and getting up came over the mic. But the others, Kieran included, slow-clapped for Evan.

  “Whoo!” Jazz cheered, “Getting started on those dad jokes! Hell yeah!”

  Someone snorted in response and started having a coughing fit, sputtering the whole time.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You okay?”

  “I think it’s Evie.” Nyx said. “Girl, you alright?”

  It took another few seconds before Evie’s voice came over the chat, weak and raspy, as if she still was struggling. “I’m okay. Water went…down wrong.”

  “You shouldn’t do that either.” Evan said, only to be met with utter silence.

  “Bro.” Ash said, and Kieran could easily see him shaking his head with that tone.

  “What?” Evan said again, right as Firo sat back down.

  “I’m back,” he said, then paused before adding, “I don’t know exactly what I missed, but Fiona; you’re not funny.”

  Kieran and several of the others let out faux gasps.

  “Oh, no he didn’t,” Jazz joked.

  “Didn’t what? Make us laugh? I know.” Firo said, without missing a beat.

  Laughter did finally erupt then, alongside a struggling snorting sound that must have been Evie, still trying to breathe.

  “Evie, are you alright?” Nyx asked, finally.

  “Yup, I’ll manage.” Evie responded, her voice still sounding rough and labored. “Let’s just get going.”

  “Oh shit. One sec, I need more tea.” Marissa said, before going muted in the chat.

  Kieran just laughed. “Why do we always need to take turns? Can’t we just all get up and do our things at the same time?”

  “Shut up, you napping old man.” Evan snarked.

  By the time everyone was actually ready to go, it was another 20 minutes. Evan ended up having to get up to help with Eli briefly, and everyone else did their own things for a bit. But once he returned, everyone was slowly reorganized into a group and finally gathered and ready to go.

  When Marissa finally put the group in, Kieran was raring to go, mostly recovered from his accidental nap.

  “Okay…” Ash breathed out as everyone loaded into the second [Scenario]. The same landscape that they had left behind after clearing the first [Scenario] spread out before them. The town gate, or what remained of it, was still smoldering behind them.

  The area between their group and the city in the near distance was an absolute mess. What had probably been a beautiful green prairie originally was now a pockmarked, torn up landscape. Fomorian patrols were wandering around the area, looking to defend their supply lines toward the city they were besieging. There were even a few small wagons moving supplies around to camps.

  From their current location, the party had a fairly obvious path to [Gorias]. It would take them through a thin part of the enemy’s blockade, where they were still in the process of surrounding the whole city.

  “Well, I can see where they want us to go.” Evie said wryly. “Is that the plan?”

  “From here, what other options do we actually see?” Firo asked. “We know the goal is to get to the city. I think no matter what we do, we need to break through the enemy line, right?”

  “It looks like they're still in the process of surrounding the city, so there’s just the slight hole in front of us left.” Kieran said.

  "I know it’s obviously cool to consider how we break the scenario and do something weird, but there’s nothing wrong with going down the middle.” Marissa said.

  “Here, here.” Evie cheered.

  “So…we charge straight ahead? Evan asked, as he edged Fiona forward ahead of the group.

  “Any objections to running full steam ahead?” Ash asked.

  “Nope.”

  “None here.”

  “Let’s go!”

  “Charge!”

  With zero objections heard, Fiona drew her weapons and simply ran forward. The rest of the party followed a few steps behind, with Aleister carrying up the rear.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for patrols. I assume we'll eventually run into the blockade, but until then we should try to avoid fighting, yeah?” Ash said.

  “Agreed.” Firo said. “I would guess that the patrols here function basically the same as the ones in part one. They’ll probably call for backup or something if we don’t shut them down fast enough.”

  “You know,” Jazz said, “we still don’t actually know what happens when you don’t stop the call. And right now would be the right time to see what it does…Just saying.”

  Kieran chuckled. “She has a point. We avoided the patrols altogether before because we didn’t want to risk wiping after having killed whatever his name was. But right now, a wipe would hardly matter.”

  “Fair point. Hm.” Nyx said.

  “Should we try it?” Evan asked, turning Fiona toward the nearest patrol - which was still a ways out.

  “Let’s put it to a vote?” Marissa said tentatively.

  “I’m game.” Nyx said.

  “Let’s try it.” Jazz agreed.

  And evidently, that was enough for Evan who shouted “Charge!” and ran off - alone - toward the patrol.

  “We just want to see what happens when you fail to kill the horn-blower, yeah?” Ash asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “He doesn’t need us for that.” Ash said, right as Fiona entered the pull range for the enemy patrol.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re right!” Jazz said, her voice comically bright, as she started back pedaling toward where the group had spawned in. “Good luck, Fiona!”

  “Good luck!”

  “Wait - you guys!” Evan said, as he was moving back toward the party to pull the enemies back to a safe area to fight them. And then he got hit with a [Root], stopping him cold. The patrol quickly swarmed over him, surrounding the single target they had, while Fiona did her best to block and survive.

  When the horn sounded, everyone focused on trying to see what would happen.

  Kieran had expected a new group of enemies, perhaps a mini-boss type enemy, to spawn nearby and enter the fray. Or maybe ranged support for the enemy, calling in AoEs for the party to dodge.

  He did not expect the call to actually call in all of the nearby patrols. And saying ‘nearby’ wasn’t quite right. If there was a patrol visible on Kieran’s screen, they were moving toward Fiona’s location. And several of them were blowing horn notes in response to the call for help.

  “Holy shit.” Evan muttered, as he tried his best to not die immediately.

  “Holy shit is right.” Nyx said, “That’s going to be a lot of enemies.”

  “...but that wouldn’t make the pull all that dangerous, would it?” Firo asked, sounding confused. “We tore through the one patrol lighting fast in part one. If we gathered all of the patrols here, we could still feasibly AoE all of them down just fine, outnumbered or no.”

  “That’s a good point too.” Marissa said, as the group watched Fiona fight for her life.

  “Are you guys really just going to stand there?” Evan shouted. The rest of the patrols were nearing Fiona’s position, but she had managed to mostly fight her way through the first patrol on her own.

  “Do we think that there’s some kind of secondary backup triggered if we fight our way through the patrols?” Firo offered, ignoring Evan’s pleas for assistance. “Or maybe some other bonus?”

  “It’s possible.” Ash said. We don’t really know all that much about how they’re handling things yet. Given our suspicion that we can ‘go off script’, maybe we do get something for our trouble.”

  “Hey, you idiots gonna help me or not?” Evan shouted again, as he did his best to get Fiona over to the party before the other patrols converged on her.

  “We are…?” Jazz asked tentatively.

  “Yeah, let’s help.”

  “Alright.”

  The group moved to meet Fiona half way, ready to intercept the huge train of enemies following her.

  “We got incoming.” Ash said.

  “Yeah, no shit.” Evan growled, trying to hide his laughter.

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