Chapter 6

It wasn’t all bedroom sports. Jay and I had found another group of “free spirits” shall we say. They were young, dumb and full of ... themselves. I found out that Jay liked to share, and I found out that I didn’t. We had words, and I was reminded why I kept most of my relationships short.

While we kept up the farce of the ‘portal names’ I caught on pretty quickly that (with the exception of Jay and I) they were all from the same local college. Two spearmen, one sword-guy, another fire mage and an archer. I may as well just refer to them as “K, L, M, N, and O”. They were all woefully out of shape and had fried their brains from too many drugs (amazing really since they’d all been fully repaired only a few months ago).

We’d been running two separate portals, both pink, that they knew about. One of them (O-the archer I think) had the brainpower left to mark exactly when we’d left the portal. As the ten-day countdown neared, we’d surreptitiously link up and charge through any other folks just milling about the portal, catching it as it just opened and disappearing into it together. We’d done this six different times and it had worked a charm most of the time.

Portal 1 had large millipedes, ten of ‘em (on my first run with them) about a meter and a half long, and one big boss boy that was two meters long or so. Their armour on the back was really tough, so unless you were super strong or caught it perfectly at one of their joints, you were screwed. Fortunately they hated fire. A fire mage could drop a little fire bomb in front of one and it would stop dead in its tracks and high tail it outta there. If we managed to get fire underneath one, it would flip over and writhe and squeal, twisting itself up over and over. While it was doing this, a spear or arrow or sword could easily strike at the soft(ish) underbelly. As the only one with a shield, my job was to stay between the ‘killer’ and the head of the Millipede and bat it’s pinchers away when it would inevitably strike at whoever had just stabbed it. (The group may have rotated due to who was available, but we always took at least one fire-mage.)

This worked really well and after the thing stopped twitching, I was elected to search it for Silver being the only one with a weapon that would do the job effectively. As far as these assholes knew, each one of them gave up one silver, the big guy gave up three. In reality, I was ‘magically’ pocketing the prizes (thank you internet!) and only passing out half of the Silver. I was only digging into the corpses to create a mess to dissuade the stoners from looking too closely. I even found one of those marble things inside the big one once. Mine for the low cost of three Silver.

Weapons describe what they do in the portals as ‘adventuring’ or ‘work’ or maybe even as ‘fighting’ but most of what we do is actually just walking around. With six fighters, and only 10-18 of the coyotes or millipedes (turns out that the number of monsters on subsequent runs through the same level of the portal will continually rise) over a 3 hour run (on level 1 pink) I might be fighting for maybe 4-10 minutes. The problem was that 2 or three minutes fighting for your life feels like an eternity and totally wipes you out. Having a partner to work with helped though, but it was still tiring work and if the exercise didn’t get ya’ then the adrenaline crash would. George and I kept telling the others this. His mantra of “Cardio, Cardio, Cardio” was getting old, even to me but it was important and true.

On the other side of the coin, those from George’s original group who ran a portal with us either dropped out right away (about 20% of them) or embraced it, loved it, and doubled down in their training.

Of the original 30 who showed up that first day in the clearing, we still had 8 of them left (besides George and myself). Nobody had died (other than the asshat) and every one of them had run the coyotes twice (George ran the first one with 5 newbies and one of them dropped out once they left, then I went in with 5 newbies ten days later and another one of mine ‘bowed out’ (his words) leaving us with ‘the final eight’). What we had left was a core group who worked their asses off in our ‘coyote’ portal and soon needed another pink portal to flex their newfound strength and skills.

Besides this ‘official’ group, I was still ‘crashing’ portals with Jay’s group of stoner desperadoes. Jay liked ‘their’ weed, and a few ‘shrooms from time to time, but four of the other five were hardcore burnouts. I’d buy big bags of whatever I could get my hands on. (Note: the black market LOVED game Silver. Mule Weapons could take Silver across borders anywhere without the risk of the authorities finding it). I’d then have Mary in the lab at Xavier’s check it for me (and keep some for her own use) and I’d trade it to the burnouts for Silver at about half the going rate. These idiots were risking their lives for $450-$750 worth of drugs every week, and I was making a killing.

We (the Crashers, Jay, and I) had run the one pink portal (Millipedes) four times by now, and they had run it once by themselves before I ever got involved. The decision now was if we were going to go down to level 2. The Net was in consensus on this one, once even ONE party member had run a portal five times at the first level, the whole party would automatically be sent to the second level on the very next entry.

That Millipedes portal had gone up from 8 initially (so I was told) to 18 on our last run, four groups of three, and the last monster one with five of his buddies near the big dead tree in the Center that always had the portal out in its roots. That was about as much as we could handle with this group. Best bet was to find other portals, but they were not easy to find, and these lazy stoner arseholes hadn’t been out looking for one anywhere else but in their SpaceBook feeds, and in the bottom of their bong. I floated the idea of selling the exact time we exited the portal to another group (George’s) for cash or silver and leave it up to them to get in the gate the same way the Crashers had. The lazy stoners agreed and even asked me to make it happen.

George was excited to have a chance at entering another ‘free’ portal and called me all sorts of nice names when I told him I’d brokered the deal for the low price of 10 Silver. Being the nice guy that I was, I’d throw a Silver at it even though I couldn’t run it, but I would be there and show them how to enter it the ‘Crashers’ way. George and his group all passed me a single Silver and I took the payment to the stoners, offering them the cash (6 silver between the 5 of you!) or just a couple hundred dollars’ worth of drugs. Oddly one of them (O, the archer) dug her heels in for more, so I stepped away, made a fake phone call and came back with 8 Silver (or the drugs). All the stoners took the weed except for ‘O’ and I realized that she might be on to my scam. She had the most brains left of any of them, so it was certainly possible.

The second portal was lost to us when we ‘crashed’ it too early. We always went at it a few seconds early, and often didn’t have it open on us until maybe the second person was touching it, but it would still drag our whole party in (since we were linked). ‘O’ must have been more than a few seconds off in her timing, because the last of our chain lost contact with the portal and we weren’t drawn in. Some bystanders followed us mere moments later and they must have gotten lucky or just timed it better and disappeared. The Crashers just shrugged it off and lit up. They really hadn’t liked the ‘Spiders in a creepy forest’ very much anyways.

I heard later that none of the other group who made it in, made it out. ’Should have sat that one out boys!’

Jay and I took to taking walks through lightly wooded areas that she was ‘familiar’ with on my days off. We’d walk these loops that she knew about, mostly through the edges of farm fields and woodlots north of the city on my days off. The first dozen times I brought out a blanket and some condoms for some ‘al-Fresca’ fun, but the weather had turned too cold in these past few weeks to leave your ass bare and waving in the breeze for ten minutes. We found our quick fun-times hurriedly against a big broad oak tree, or once against the outside wall of a semi-ruined shack we found way off of a beaten path. Oddly enough it was on the other side of that wall that we found our next portal. I was casting about, looking for anything of interest (or value) when I found it. It was actually partially in the wall and I joked with Jay that there was a small chance that ‘they’ and I could have been teleported to the Start Room with ‘Coitus Interruptus’ earlier had either of us contacted the periphery of the portal (we had certainly been connected!). It was just barely poking out of the wall on that side that I’d just had her pressed up against.