However, I’m not willing to lose points or bonus power chips or whatever this game hands out for acts above and beyond the norm. Let’s approach this as a non-life-threatening emergency, and go for the next power level. Yeargh. How on earth did they manage that?”
As I squatted next to the dead man, the stench from his unwashed body hit me.
I pushed away the skitter of repugnance as it rippled down my back, and rummaged around the dusty recesses of my brain for any knowledge of first-aid techniques. “Thank God for all of those first-aid classes I arranged when Tara was in middle school. Let me think—a sword wound. CPR?”
A glance at the sluggishly seeping hole in his chest had me eliminating that option. There was no way putting pressure on that would help matters.
“Mouth-to-mouth?”
The man’s smell took care of that as a choice. “Hmm. Maybe I should apply a splint?”
I looked around for something to act as a splint but didn’t see any handy splintlike boards, not to mention I wasn’t absolutely certain that a splint was a suitable treatment for a sword wound. “Okay. What’s left? Er… raise his feet higher than his head? Yeah, that sounds good. That should stop the flow of blood or something. Inhibits shock, I think.”
I scooted down to grab the man’s mud-encrusted tattered boots, intending to swing them around to a stack of grain bags, but was more than a little disconcerted when one of his legs separated from the rest of his body.
“Aieeeeeeeee,” I screamed, staring in horror at the limb that hung stiffly from my hands.
Just as it was dawning on me that the leg was a crudely fashioned wooden prosthetic and not the ghoulish severed limb I had first imagined, a whoosh of air behind me accompanied the loud slam of a wooden door being thrown open. Before I could do so much as flail the false leg, a steellike arm wrapped around my waist and hauled me backward into the inn.
Air, warm and thick and scented heavily with beer and unwashed male bodies, folded me in its embrace as I was dragged into a murky open-beamed room.
“Found me a wench, Cap’n,” a voice rumbled behind me.
“Toothsome one, too, ain’t she? Don’t look like she’s been used overly much.
Can I keep her?”
Now, this was taking virtual realism a bit too far. I pushed aside the issue of how a game could make me smell things and feel the touch of another person, and beat the hand that clutched me with the booted end of my fake leg. “Hey! I am not a wench, and I am not a puppy to be kept, and how dare you invade my personal space in such a manner! Do it again, and I’ll have you up on charges of sexual harassment and physical assault so fast, your… er… hook will spin.”
The man whom I’d surprised into releasing me stood frowning at me for a second before glancing to the right, where tables—some broken into kindling, others rickety but mostly whole—lurked in a shadowed corner. The dull rumble of masculine voices broke off as the man asked loudly, “I don’t have no hook, do I, Cap’n?”
“Nay, lad, ye don’t,” a deep voice answered. One of the darker shadows separated itself from the others and stepped into the faint sunlight that bullied its way through two tiny, begrimed windows. The man who swaggered forward was an arrogant-looking devil, with thick shoulder-length blond hair, a short-cropped goatee and mustache, and dark eyes that even across the dimly lit room I could see were cast with a roguish light.
He was a charmer through and through—I knew his kind. I’d married one.
“I believe the lass was being facetious, Barn. As for yer request—we’ve no need for a female on theSquirrel. Grab yer things and we’ll be off, mates. We’ve pillagin‘ to do.”
The man who’d grabbed me—a blocky giant with black hair and a huge beard—frowned even harder. “What be facetious, then?”
“Later, Barn.”
The behemoth named Barn looked back at me, disappointment written all over his unlovely face. “But the wench—she’s mine. I found her. Ye’ve said we could keep what we pillaged.”
“She’s probably got the French pox,” the arrogant blond said as he started for the door, giving me nothing more than a disinterested glance. “We’ll find ye a woman a little less tartish at Mongoose.”
“Oh!” I gasped, outraged at the slur. I wasn’t going to stand around and let some cyber-gigolo insult me. “I will repeat myself for those of you with hearing problems or general mental incapacity—I am not a wench, nor am I a tart. I do not have the pox, French or any other sort. And I would rather go without my PDA for an entire year than be withthatman.”
The blond captain paused in the act of following Barn out the door, slowly turning to face me. “What did you say?”
“I said that I am not a wench nor do I have any sexually transmitted diseases.
And I’m not, in case you’re interested, and I know you are because I know your sort, looking to acquire any. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a leg to reattach to a dead man. If you will please stand aside, I will go and take care of that.”
“PDA?” the pirate asked, an odd look of speculation on his face. “You said PDA?”
“Yes, I did. And that’s a very big sacrifice, considering.”
“You’re a player,” he said, starting toward me in a long-legged stride that I refused to notice on the grounds that I would not allow myself to respond to another love-‘em-and-leave-’em charmer.
