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  Vivian Vande Velde

  * * *

  Magic Carpet Books

  Harcourt, Inc.

  San Diego New York London

  * * *

  Text copyright © 1991 by Vivian Vande Velde

  Illustration copyright © 1991 by Gary Lippincott

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.harcourt.com

  First Magic Carpet Books edition 2001

  First published 1991

  Magic Carpet Books is a trademark of Harcourt, Inc.,

  registered in the United States of America and/or other jurisdictions.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Vande Velde, Vivian.

  User unfriendly/Vivian Vande Velde.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Arvin and his friends risk using a computer-

  controlled role-playing game to simulate a magical world in which

  they actually become fantasy characters, even though the computer

  program is a pirated one containing unpredictable errors.

  [1. Fantasy games—Fiction. 2. Computer games—Fiction.

  3. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V2773Us 1991

  [Fic]—dc20 90-21060

  ISBN 0-15-200960-4

  ISBN 0-15-216353-0 pb

  Designed by Camilla Filancia

  E G H F D

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  This book is dedicated, with appreciation,

  to Ed and Gary

  for taking the time to explain

  the game to somebody's mother,

  to Norm and Barb

  for support and help above

  and beyond the call of duty,

  and to Jane

  for unrelenting enthusiasm.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  1 DAY ONE [>]

  2 PLAYER CHARACTERS [>]

  3 PROVISIONS [>]

  4 HORSES [>]

  5 FOREST [>]

  6 GLITCH [>]

  7 LUNCH [>]

  8 WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR? [>]

  9 ENCOUNTER [>]

  10 DISAPPEARING ACT [>]

  11 REAPPEARING ACT [>]

  12 DAY TWO [>]

  13 THE STATUE [>]

  14 BOOTS, SWORD, CRYSTAL [>]

  15 NONPLAYER CHARACTER [>]

  16 THE SHADOW CAVES [>]

  17 IN THE DARK [>]

  18 LOST [>]

  19 NIGHT WATCH [>]

  20 DAY THREE [>]

  21 SAND HANDS [>]

  22 CHANGE IN PLANS [>]

  23 BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON [>]

  24 IN THE DARK OF THE NIGHT [>]

  25 AFTERMATH [>]

  26 DAY FOUR [>]

  27 MILLER'S GROVE [>]

  28 DESERT [>]

  29 SANNATIA [>]

  30 THE OTHER SIDE [>]

  31 DUNGEON [>]

  32 PRISONERS (PART I) [>]

  33 PRISONERS (PART II) [>]

  34 PRISONERS (PART III) [>]

  35 DAY FIVE [>]

  36 PRISONERS (PART IV) [>]

  37 DORINDA [>]

  38 FINAL SCORES [>]

  1. DAY ONE

  The first thing I noticed was the smell.

  Take that back.

  The first thing I noticed was the stink. I nearly gagged, and rolled over from my side onto my back.

  The second thing I noticed was that I was itchy all over. But before I could get too busy worrying that Shelton had set me down on an anthill—and figuring what I'd do to him if he had—I realized that I was lying on straw. The reason this place smelled like a barn was because it was a barn.

  I moved the crook of my elbow over my nose. It didn't help. From just off to my right there was a soft whuffing noise. I turned my head and found I was about five feet away from this incredibly big horse. I mean, I've seen pictures of horses, and I know people used to ride them and all, but I'd never expected them to be so huge. The thing shifted its weight, setting this absolutely enormous hoof even closer to my head. Terrific. Twenty seconds into the game and I was about to get my face stepped on by the local transportation.

  I wondered if anybody ever paid his money, got killed in the opening moves of the game, and spent the whole campaign in the cool gray gauziness that the computer calls death. It would only last an hour, but it would feel like five days. That hardly seemed fair. Surely there was some rule prohibiting it, or people would demand a refund. I backed off from that thought and from the thought that went with it: There was, in this particular campaign, no one to enforce the rules. Rules had already been broken just to get us here.

  But then the computer conditioning kicked in.

  I mean, I still remembered who I was and all that. But everything just sort of suddenly kind of shifted. Sure, I knew I was really Arvin Rizalli of Mrs. Kascima's eighth-grade class at Saint John the Evangelist School; but I felt like Harek Longbow of the Silver Mountains Clan, an elf warrior of the fourth level. All at once I had all these dim sort of ... I guess you could call them memories ... about how to ride a horse and take care of it, just as if I'd been doing it all my life. Just the way a fourth-level elf warrior would have.

  I got to my feet and scratched the underside of the horse's neck. "Easy," I murmured, though before then I'd been the one in need of calming. As if from a great distance, I recognized my sense of surprise at the prickliness of the horse's hide and my sense of alarm when it tossed its head, its breath warm on my arm. But the Harek in me wasn't worried at all.

  I looked around the stable. (And suddenly I knew it was a stable, and not a barn.) It was small, dark, smelly—even by medieval stable standards. Daub-and-wattle construction, I observed, though on my own I wouldn't even have been sure what that meant: twigs held together by mud and dung. Not a real high-class establishment. The door was open, letting in some light. Morning, I judged.

  Well, the adventure wasn't likely to come to me here. Shelton Jankowitz, I hope you know what you're doing, I thought.

  But it was too late for that.

  I peeked out the door and found myself looking down a small village street. The stable was up against another building. An inn, I guessed, spotting a sign with a barrel painted on it.

  Where were the others? One part of me, the Arvin part, answered that they were asleep in Shelton's basement rec room. All of us were. Shelton had parked himself in front of the computer, fat lot of good that would do him in the stage of sleep called REM—Rapid Eye Movement state. My mother, of all people, was on the recliner. Dawn Marie shared the love seat (of course) with Noah. Sometimes it seemed to me that the two of them must be attached with an invisible strand of Super Glue, but they're tenth-graders and sometimes tenth-graders get like that. Giannine was in the lounge chair. Cleveland, Dominic, and I were stuck with the pillows sprawled on the floor.

  But where we really were was unimportant. What counted was where we felt we were. Or rather, where the computer hookup made us feel we were.

  Find Rasmussem, that was the one directive from Rasmussem, Inc., and there had been no reason for Shelton to change it when he'd pirated the program. Sometimes Rasmussem was a person, sometimes a place, occas
ionally an object—according to those who had played before. Shouldn't be too hard to find; it wasn't meant to be a puzzle, but only an introduction to the campaign for the player characters.

  I headed for the inn, figuring that'd be the place to meet people, to ask questions.

  But the inn was, in its own way, even worse than the stable. The floor was rough-hewn planks of wood. There were candle holders attached to the walls, though without any candles. I knew what they were by the globs of dripped wax and by the black, sooty crescents on the walls and ceiling. I was willing to bet the owners of this place wouldn't provide light except when it was absolutely necessary. Their customers were probably the sort who stole candles.

  I walked in feeling self-conscious. My clothes were straight from an old Hildebrandts print, but there was no telling what had resulted from the combination of my instructions, Shelton's perception of them, and the computer's ability. If we had been doing this right—if we had gone through an official Rasmussem outlet—I would have had the benefit of all their expensive bio-feedback equipment, which would have responded directly to my conscious desires. Of course, if we had gone through Rasmussem, it would have cost a fortune, and we would have had their rules to contend with. Still, it was very disconcerting not to know what I looked like. I hoped I'd get a chance to see my face before the others did.

  The room was hazy with smoke from the fireplace. There were maybe three dozen people sitting at beer-barrel tables, mostly humans, mostly guys—except for the serving wenches and a few women who looked even meaner than the men. My impression was that everybody knew everybody, except, of course, for me.

  I hate being places where I don't know anybody.

  I approached the bar, where a man with a gold hoop in one ear wiped up spills with a gray rag. I leaned against the bar, which was sticky despite the bartender's efforts. "Excuse me—"

  "What'll it be?"

  "I was wondering—"

  "What'll it be?"

  "I just have a question—"

  "1 only answer questions from patrons. What'll it be?"

  I felt the pouch at my belt. I would have been provided with a few starting gold pieces. At the last second I came to my senses enough to bite off a request for soda. "Do you have coffee?" I asked. My mom says coffee stunts a kid's growth; but I figured if it hadn't stunted me by fourteen, why worry about it now?

  "Coffee?" the barkeep said. He flopped the rag over, and it smacked the bar wetly. "Never heard of it."

  I sighed. "Could I just have some water then?"

  He gave me this look like I was a real pain in the you-know-where.

  "I'll pay."

  He folded his arms and stared at me coolly. Finally, just as I was beginning to squirm, he took a tin mug from under the counter and wrung his rag over it. "One gold piece."

  Cute. People were beginning to watch. Rough-looking people, with swords and eye patches and missing teeth. "Maybe I'll have a beer," I said. I didn't have to drink it.

  The barkeep dumped the gray sudsy water onto the floor, barely missing my foot. He refilled the same mug with amber foam from a barrel behind him.

  "Thanks so very much," I said.

  Apparently sarcasm didn't faze him. He held one hand on the mug, the other out for the gold piece.

  I handed it over. "I was wondering where Rasmussem is."

  He let go of the mug only after biting the coin. "Information costs."

  "I just paid you."

  "You just paid me for beer."

  I took another coin from my pouch and held it over his extended hand. "Where's Rasmussem?"

  He wriggled his fingers. "Pay and I'll tell."

  I sighed and dropped the coin.

  He made it disappear into his apron pocket, then resumed wiping the bar.

  "Well?"

  "Well, what?"

  "Where's Rasmussem?"

  "Here, you dumb twit. This is Rasmussem. The Rasmussem Inn. Dumb twit of an elf, don't even know where you are." He shook his head.

  Nice world. And I was going to spend five days here? I was insane for letting Shelton talk me into this, and I probably deserved whatever I got. I took my drink and found an empty table in the corner by the door.

  Being careful not to spill, though they didn't look too careful about that sort of thing here, I tipped the mug to catch my warped reflection in the metal surface. My hair was long and very light blond. Sort of the color of the stringy stuff you have to pick off of corn on the cob. It was a shock. What I had asked for, but a shock.

  My blue-gray eyes were the shade of faded denim, and the eyebrows tipped upward, giving me the appearance of cool disdain. The pointy ears were a bit too large, and I pulled the hair in front of them; but that made me look like a girl. Next time, I thought, I'd have Shelton make the ears shorter. And wasn't that a laugh? Two minutes ago I'd been hating it, and here I was saying "next time" with the campaign not even started yet. Maybe this was going to be fun after all, despite the bad start.

  I'd just thought that, when someone kicked open the door beside me. It was a dwarf, looking meaner than the men or the women, and he was dragging a dead body behind him.

  2. PLAYER CHARACTERS

  Several people jumped to their feet for a closer look. Others quickly settled up, gulping down their drinks or abandoning them, eager to get out before trouble started. Those who were quickest to the door collided with a group on their way in—townspeople who'd followed the dwarf and his grisly burden from the street. Instant traffic jam, right there by my table.

  I took a swig from my mug, because that's what people on TV do to steady their nerves. But the liquid was more bitter than I expected, and warmer and fizzier, which made me cough and sneeze at the same time. Wonderful start, I thought, wiping my face on my sleeve. I became aware of something resting against my ankle and looked before I thought not to. It was the corpse's hand. His glazed eyes seemed to be looking directly at mine.

  I've never liked the kind of stories with exploding heads or severed limbs or brains trickling out of people's ears, and I gulped. This was make-believe, I reminded myself: a computer-generated image that looked and sounded and smelled and tasted and felt so real because it was hooked up directly to my brain. But make-believe just the same.

  It didn't help.

  "Quiet!" bellowed a voice about two inches from my ear. The crowd inside the inn settled a bit. From the edges of the group people were still demanding to know what was going on, or complaining that they couldn't see.

  The dwarf climbed onto my table. The noise level dropped several decibels more. "I am Feordin Macewielder, son of Feordan Sturdyaxe, grandson of Feordane Boldheart, brother to Feordone the Fearless, great-grandson of Feordine Stoutarm who served under Graggaman Maximus."

  With dwarfs, this can go on forever. They always introduce themselves by introducing their ancestors. All their ancestors. And the names always sound alike. As Harek, I had memories of seeing dwarfs kill people for trying to rush them through the litany; they killed them and then recited over the dead bodies, starting again from the very beginning.

  But this dwarf, Feordin, must have come from an undistinguished family line. Or he recognized the need for uncommon urgency, for he stopped after a mere four generations and pointed to the corpse by my foot. "And that man,"—as if on cue, everyone took one giant step back, so that I had a clear view of the man's arrow-ridden body. I gulped, but my stomach didn't lurch this time. Computer conditioning again: as an elf warrior, I wouldn't be unsettled by death. "That man," the dwarf said, "was a soldier, dressed, as you can see, in the livery of the Grand Guard of your king, Ulric, known as The Fair."

  The computer had planted a memory, something I would have known as an inhabitant of this land. Ulric, I knew as soon as I thought about it, was king of the human community. He was respected—as not all human kings were—by elves and dwarfs and halflings alike. They sometimes called him "The Fair," which referred both to his reputation as a just ruler and to the straw-colored h
air he'd had in his youth. Now more often he was called "The Old King." He'd had three wives—one at a time, of course—but they'd all died. He'd outlived four sons also, and had only one daughter, Dorinda. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Dorinda, ten years old and loved by everyone. Ulric had formed the elite Grand Guard—twenty-five of the fastest, strongest, best men in the kingdom—to watch over her and accompany her wherever she went.

  And one of them was dead.

  "Orc arrows," I murmured, noting the raven feathers and the pattern of fletching.

  Feordin heard and turned on me. "Oh aye," he said, his tone indicating I was the biggest jerk he or his ancestors had ever met. "Orc arrows."

  A woman who was dressed in a plain green gown stooped to get a closer look. "Not likely a Grand Guardsman would find himself surprised by orcs," she said. It was the same thing Feordin had hinted at with his tone. The same thing I knew. Orcs couldn't tie their shoelaces without a captain to tell them to and three sergeants to show them how. I'd never said the guy'd been killed by orcs; I'd just said orc arrows.

  The woman stood. Dawn Marie, I was sure of it, butting in where nobody needed her. "Where was the body found?" she asked Feordin.

  The dwarf nodded his head to the left, west. "Toward Sannatia," he said, a name that meant nothing to me.

  But it meant something to most of the others. "Ah," the crowd murmured in a tone that gave me goose bumps.

  "What's Sannatia?" someone else asked, sparing me the burden of having to play the jerk again. This person looked like a native American Indian. I figured he was from our group. For one thing, while we can be whoever we want, from whatever time period or piece of fiction we choose, the nonplayer characters that the computer provides are all matched to the setting. Probably Dominic, I decided, who usually chose to play trackers and rangers and solitary warrior types. Another way I knew he was one of us was from the incredulous looks he was getting, like all the townspeople already knew what Sannatia was.

  The dwarf looked at him contemptuously. "The deserted city," he said. "Nobody lives there."