Somnia Online by K.T. Hanna (reading strategies book txt) 📕

of the cave. It wasn’t a small entrance. Probably two or three school buses across. It looked like a large mouth waiting for them to step inside so it could snap shut.

Silence fell over the raid as everyone waited.

Karn spoke over raid’s written chat: There are guarding shark…things? Four sets of three on either side of a large ramp that seems to go up a long way and emerges out of the water, if the glare off the top is anything to go by.

Snowy sent Murmur images that showed just what they were in her mind. A type of shark that resembled a centaur, except the legs were fins and the proportions were all wrong. The ramp up to the top of wherever it led was wide and appeared to be quite long.

“Do you think you can stealth up the rest of the ramp?” Murmur asked.

Probably. Maybe. Might want to let Snowy do that; they seem to be sensing me. They keep looking in my direction, and he’s on the other side.

“Stay safe. Don’t risk them discovering you.” Murmur knew it sounded weird, but she was fairly certain if the creatures knew they were coming, they’d be more prepared than they already were.

Snowy shot back images to her along with conveying the distinct feeling that the wolf totally thought they could take all of the opponents in there and thank you very much.

“We have organized trash mob groups to fight through before we even get into the dome proper,” she announced over the raid. “More like guards. There appears to be a massive cage or jail cell in the rear of the cave, but there are too many mobs for Snowy to make his way through any further.”

Come back. She sent the message through her connection to Snowy, and to Karn in a message.

“First things first.” Devlish took charge, after glancing momentarily at Murmur. He could probably see how much this strange behavior from friends was beginning to affect her. “Gear up—put on any new pieces you may have gotten in this dungeon. Check your supplies and see Beastial if you need any stocked up on.”

He turned to Murmur. “So, does it look like the four groups are chained together?”

Murmur shook her head. “Probably not. Just two groups of three. I mean, I can probably Mez them since they’re not bosses.” She could even hear the fatigue in her own voice. No wonder Devlish was worried.

It seemed in refraining from letting her emotions dictate what the group did, she’d managed somehow to drain herself through her reading of the emotions they were actually feeling. Empathy was downright exhausting.

The raid buffed, prepped, and got themselves ready in short order. Snowy stood at Murmur’s side once more, allowing her the opportunity to gain some of his courage as she scratched his neck. She had another bad feeling about this, and last time she’d had one, the damned boss mob had split itself apart to reveal its mother.

Devlish called out for the raid to move in, and Murmur tried to quiet her unease, even as the shadow of the cave mouth swallowed them whole.

 

Storm Entertainment

Somnia Online Division

Game Development Offices - Shayla’s Office

Day Thirty-One

Davenport frowned as he ran through the feed David passed to him. Staven stood next to the door, guarding it. Laria chewed her fingernails while she waited on her boss, already having perused the information herself. It echoed so much of what she’d been through with Wren, just perhaps not as deep a case as hers was back then. Either that or she was now desensitized to all this crap.

She knew Davenport was trying to discern the different between James’s and Wren’s readings. While James’s were very similar, the deviations from the norm weren’t as large as Wren’s had been. Just the same pattern. She wasn’t a neurosurgeon, though…

Brainwave readings like that had always scared her the most. She didn’t understand them nearly as much as she did the other things. So Laria waited, watching as Davenport’s expressions flickered through myriad emotions. As David stood with his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his toes. She bit her lip, and Shayla reached over and gave her a hug.

“I don’t even like the guy, and I feel like shit for him,” she whispered a few decibels too loud.

Shayla shrugged. “Just because he’s a douchebag doesn’t mean you have to wish him something worse than death.”

“Come on, you two.” Davenport finally blinked away his screen. “It’s not even that bad. It’s not quite at the level Wren’s was at the height of her attachment. Though there’s something else in there that I don’t quite understand and will need my experts to look over.”

His brow wrinkled as if he was trying desperately to figure out just where they’d gone wrong with the whole project, not just this one login. Overall, the man was known for his attention to detail, and it had to chafe that they’d all somehow missed a heap of details in the lead-up to launch.

“For now, we will keep him in his apartment. I’ve reached an…” he winced slightly as he sought the word he was looking for, “agreement with our business partners, and for now we are monitoring the situation for them.”

“His connection isn’t as deep, because his headset, while following the same specifications, isn’t a precise copy of Wren’s. It would have been made before hers, too. I haven’t been able to sever his connection to the mainframe in any way because his character cannot currently be located.” Davenport pinched the bridge of his nose and scrunched his eyes up like he was trying to force the answers out of his skull.

“It could be much the same as it was when Wren and her whole raiding party managed to somehow enter limbo. Into a place in the game space where they were neither in it, nor out of it?” Laria ran the computations they’d used over in her head. They’d researched into every aspect