Krim Tales: A Krim World Collection: Krim World Collection, #1

By Maria Korolov

Explore a virtual medieval world full of danger and intrigue in this thrilling collection of stories from the gritty virtual realm of Krim. Process server Ellison Davo navigates this lawless land serving subpoenas, getting stabbed, solving a grisly murder, and clashing with the enigmatic Elea Carlyle. Action, adventure, scheming, and brawling abound in this vividly imagined tale that blends sci-fi and fantasy into a riveting saga. If you love immersive virtual reality worlds and page-turning mysteries, you'll be drawn into this imaginative collection that brings the perilous realm of Krim to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Korolov Media
• Release date: Aug 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223027027

Book preview

Krim Tales

Three novellas of the Krim virtual world.

By Maria Korolov

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Copyright © 2023 Maria Korolov

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Praise for Krim Virtual World Novellas

If you enjoy Terry Pratchett, you will definitely love this. —Amazon.com

Unique and entertaining storytelling. — Amazon.com

I’m super picky about what I read. For me, the ideal story has to not only have a great plot, but also be well written and it needs to have that warm and cozy feeling. This one hits every spot! — Grumps, Amazon.com

I’m looking forward to the next story, and hope to learn a lot more about the backstory to some of the key players, all of whom have the most unexpected quirks! —  L. Pierce, Amazon.com

Nice futuristic look at the metaverse, and people’s hopes of someway what technology might bring. —Da Admiral, HypergridBusiness.com

Table of Contents

Krim Times

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

The Lost King of Krim

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Krim Deeds

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Krim Times

1

Once upon a time, there was a virtual world that was almost, but not quite, completely unlike 1500s England.

The assassin peered out from the window overlooking Leadenhall Street. It was mid-day and there were plenty of targets. Local residents, mostly, but also a fair number of tourists and would-be adventurers looking for quests. The tourists drew the eye with their colorful, impractical period clothing still mostly unstained by city filth. It was tempting.

But the assassin was waiting for someone else.

MURDER AND ROBBERY were not, as such, against the grid’s terms of service. Neither were torture, cannibalism, or open warfare.

That made the job of law enforcement a lot easier.

Marshal Henderson Trask, security chief for the Krim Chamber of Commerce, had a very narrow area of authority, and he liked it that way.

Grid administrators handled serious offenses like griefing and violations of the Krim Terms of Service. Outside city limits, disputes between residents were usually settled by local kings, bandit leaders, and other local bigwigs. Disputes between kings were settled on the battlefield. Private disputes between residents inside city limits were taken care of with beatings or murders.

Trask only got involved when a problem threatened to affect city commerce. More specifically, the business interests of Chamber members.

It was an important job.

Visitors came to the grid for the quests and other role-playing opportunities, but the city was where they spent their money. They bought the weapons they needed for the quests, their clothing, and the provisions for their trips. This is where they came to raise armies for their campaigns. This is where they sold the produce they grew or the goods they crafted. And this is where they rented their homes and workshops.

The big battles that took place outside the city, and the weird sex cults that flourished in the hinterlands, were all appealing, and prominently featured in the grid’s marketing materials. But it was Krim’s central business district that brought in the money and helped keep the lights on.

The Barley Mow Inn on Leadenhall Street was one of Constable Marshal Henderson Trask’s favorite places to eat.

The walk from the Chamber of Commerce was less than half a mile, with no hills, and the menu was full of carbohydrates and fats. No potatoes, but you couldn’t get them anywhere on the grid.

Skirrets are what the grid’s residents had to eat instead of potatoes. They were more historically accurate but also nasty and thin. After you peeled them there was hardly anything left. But add some salt, deep fry them in lard, and you almost had french fries.

I’ll have the day’s special, Trask told Quimby, owner and head cook. Extra salt on the fries.

The skirret delivery hasn’t come in today, said Quimby. Lots of delays everywhere because of the sniper. Are you getting close to catching him?

We are, we are, Trask assured him.

Then he thought—what sniper? Where? Today? Here?

He glanced out the window but didn’t see anything unusual. Just regular pedestrian and wagon traffic. Though now that he thought about it, maybe a little less than usual.

Trask pulled out a notepad.

We’ve got all hands on deck, he added. Believe me, it’s our top priority. Now tell me what you’ve seen.

Nothing, I haven’t seen anything. Quimby slapped his towel against his leg. Do you know who it is?

Certainly, said Trask. We have several suspects.

But the only suspect Trask could think of was Larry the Lifter, who wasn’t so much in the sniping business and more into picking pockets.

Quimby took the rest of Trask’s order and stomped back to the kitchen.

While he was gone, Trask waved at the other occupants of the dining room, a trio of dice players at the central table.

Any of you boys see anything?

They just glanced over and shook their heads. For a second, he considered getting up and investigating, but immediately dismissed the idea. It would require too much exercise. He drank his ale.

Quimby returned and dropped a plate of wet suckets in front of Trask with a thud, almost knocking over the tankard. Quimby accompanied the food with a loud harrumph and stomped back to the kitchen.

Trask had a policy of not asking people what was bothering them, on the off chance that it might cause them to start telling him about their problems. Worse yet, the problems were often Trask’s fault.

Instead, he tucked a corner of a large, dirty cloth handkerchief into his collar, to protect the front of his shirt and doublet from food stains, and dug in.

In his personal style, Trask modeled himself after King Henry VIII. Not only was this somewhat appropriate to the grid’s setting, but it also allowed him to look even larger than he was.

However, without an army of servants to help him with clothing, keeping it even somewhat clean was a challenge. This was a significant concern of his life on Krim. When he was inside, spilled food and drink were a constant threat. Outside, he had to contend with mud and manure and refuse of all kinds—and chamber pots thrown out of the second-story windows that jutted out over the thoroughfares.

Trask was twice as wide as his chair, only some of that due to his physical flesh. The rest of the width came from his box coat, stuffed with historically accurate straw for added volume, with puffy upper sleeves and a fur lining.

Hey, dalcop! yelled one of the regulars swilling strong ale at the central table in the room. That cutpurse is back!

Dalcop? asked one of his mates. Did you get that from your word of the day calendar?

Trask glanced out the window. Larry the Lifter was half-hiding behind a cart piled high with skirrets.

Skirrets. Thank God.

It was a major point of contention between the grid’s residents and its owners. Why allow coffee but no potatoes? Why have cigarettes but no guns? Why did the grid’s residents have to suffer from colds, lice, and risk of gangrene but not something really fun and interesting, like the black plague?

These were all mysteries that nobody, not even the grid’s owners, could satisfactorily explain.

He’s going into my report. Trask began writing.

This is why the grid is going downhill, said the regular. Even the cops don’t care about anything. What good is a report going to do?

Pretty soon everyone will be gone, said another. Did you hear that Vlad the Inhaler got his head chopped off last week? Word is, he’s not coming back. Says he’s going back to real life, to spend time with family.

That’s a lie. Nobody wants to spend time with their family. He’s probably going to sneak back in when his two weeks are up, with a new character, and get back at everyone.

I should probably watch my back then, said the third. I threw rotten eggs at him when he was in the stocks.

Well, you know what they say, said the first. If you can’t handle the torture and the beheadings, stay out of Krim.

The three men raised their tankards, banged them together, and drank, then went back to their dice game.

Quimby returned from the kitchen with goodinycakes and a shield of cold brawn with mustard.

You know, we don’t pay you to just sit around and stuff yourself, he told Trask. Crime’s up in all the trade areas. If you can’t be bothered, the Chamber should find someone else.

You should file a report, Quimby! said one of the dice players.

I’m going to take care of it, said Trask. Trust me.

The sniper’s just the latest thing. I’ve been hearing about a lot of bad stuff happening, said Quimby. All the merchants are getting harassed. Just last night, someone killed one of my customers. Choked him to death with her breasts.

The door opened.

The man who walked in was covered head to toe with leather and metal armor.

Welcome, my good sir, and good morrow, said Quimby. Thou art a strapping young figure of a lad. Prithee, won’t thou partaketh of our fine establishment? A mighty fine repast awaits thee.

I’m not a tourist, said the visitor. I’m looking for the newspaper building.

Next block over, said Quimby. But Seymour won’t get in for at least a couple of hours, and he’ll stop by here first. Feel free to wait here. Quimby gestured at the open tables. Sit anywhere you like.

It’s been quite a hike, the visitor said. He put a leather briefcase on the table, sat down, and pulled off his helmet. Got any tea?

Sorry, no tea.

Isn’t this supposed to be England?

Tea didn’t come to England until the mid-1600s, said Quimby. We’re set roughly in the 1500s.

The dice players looked up from their dice with enthusiasm.

Strictly speaking, one began.

Krim is not a historically accurate representation of 1500s England, interrupted another.

Tea was, in fact, available in 1500, throughout Asia and along the Silk Road, said the first. There is no reason why it couldn’t have been brought to England earlier.

We should also be allowed to have potatoes.

And indoor plumbing.

If the grid admins knew what they were doing...

Trask looked at the newcomer.

He said he wasn’t a tourist, but he didn’t know about tea. So, a newcomer of some kind. Seemed comfortable enough in his armor, but slow. More focused on defense than offense.

So, Quimby, said one of the dice players. You said someone died here last night. Anyone we know?

Some adventurer, Quimby said. His friends stopped by later and took the body.

And it was a woman who did him in, you said? With her breasts? That’s how I’d want to go.

We don’t get many women on Krim, said another player. Why is that?

Well, there’s Tattie Lovell next door. The seamstress.

And the ladies down at the Liberties.

And a couple in the assassins guild.

I hear there’s a sex cult goddess somewhere up north.

Really? Sex cult? That might make me want to go out there and do some adventuring.

Sure, I’ll go with you. I hear they’re recruiting at the halls now for some big battle.

We’d have to get some warmer clothes. I hear they’re heading up north.

It can get pretty cold up there.

Trask knew they wouldn’t go. It was too unpleasant outside the city limits. Sure, inside the city, you could get kicked by a horse, or run over by a cart, but if you weren’t dead you could at least drag yourself to a gate. On a campaign trail, you could be days or weeks away from a gate. If you got hurt, you might die an exceedingly slow and painful death.

It was all spelled out in the grid’s Terms of Service.

On the other hand, there was a lot more crime in the city. The population density was higher, for one thing.

Crime wasn’t technically illegal on Krim. At least, not the usual crimes like murder or robbery. There were plenty of things that were violations of the grid’s Terms of Service, like attempting to evade import and export restrictions and fees. Or counterfeiting official grid documents.

Otherwise, crime was just part of the fun. Knowing that you could get bashed on the head at any time added that little extra spice that made Krim so memorable. The grid owners didn’t seem to care and were happy to let most residents settle disputes on their own.

People who made their living on the grid tended to be pretty pragmatic about the whole thing. Merchants and content creators made sure that their wills were up to date and on file. If they got killed, they just took their two-week vacation off-world, then came back with a new character.

If anything, death was good for the grid, since it forced users to buy completely new outfits and convert more cash to in-world currency.

But death was also painful and inconvenient. Residents who died too many times tended to just throw in the towel and move somewhere else. Or remember that they had real-life obligations to attend to.

Lately, it seemed that crime was on the rise, especially crime targeting the most economically important residents, who had most to lose when they died—the merchants, the crafters, and various other business people.

And more and more often, justice was delivered by the mob and was swift and gruesome. The violence seemed to be breeding more violence, as the crime and its punishments drew in the most bloodthirsty. Casual tourists enjoyed seeing the occasional head on a stake, but when the violence got too close and personal, it hurt traffic.

Trask finished his meal and leaned back in his chair. He should be getting back to his headquarters, he thought. It was time to check in.

That was when he heard a commotion outside.

Thief! Thief! someone yelled.

2

The assassin watched his target get closer. When the target was 50 yards away, he pulled the curtain away enough to get the crossbow into position and waited for the right moment.

STOP, THIEF!

Trask looked out the window. Larry was wriggling his way through the crowd, trying to put some distance between him and some guy who was on the ground, getting covered in manure and swearing loudly.

I think that’s Seymour, said Quimby.

It was. Larry the Lifter must have bumped into Gellhorn as cover for a quick grab at his valuables, Trask thought but misjudged and knocked him to the ground. Or maybe Seymour tripped or slipped on something. Like an inconveniently located pile of manure.

You say that’s Seymour Gellhorn, the newspaper guy? piped up the armored newcomer.

Trask knew Seymour Gellhorn well. Or, to be more exact, he vaguely recognized Seymour and knew his newspaper well. The newspaper had noted the recent increase in crime and had unaccountably decided that Trask was at fault. Trask had once considered becoming a restaurant critic for the newspaper and now was glad that he didn’t, since it turned out that AviNewz was just a low-end, rumor-mongering trash tabloid.

Seymour tried to stand. He got halfway up but slipped again on whatever he had slipped on the first time. While he was flailing, trying to catch himself, an arrow flew through the air where his head had just been.

It smacked into the heavy timber wall.

Trask looked to see where the arrow came from.

The most likely source was an open window on the second floor of the building directly across the street, where someone in a dark cloak was notching a second arrow. Trask felt a sharp pain in his stomach, possibly from realizing that he was the one the newspaper was going to blame. Or maybe because of eating too much.

A second arrow flew, but missed again, and went through the eye of a pedestrian in a default avatar outfit. An innocent noob. A tourist. Trask recognized the outfit. It was the comely wench, very popular.

It took Trask a couple of tries to push himself up from the table and by the time he was outside, the tourist was dead, and the assassin was gone from the window.

Trask lurched across the street towards the dress shop, dodging mules, horses, and carts, glancing up at the open window frequently in case there was an arrow aimed at him. It never came.

Trask looked back for a second. Seymour was on his feet and starting to follow him. People were mostly edging back, outside the line of fire. Trask caught a glimpse of Larry working his way around the outer edges of the crowd.

A random sniper could cause panic in the city. And if the sniping became a regular event, tourists would stop coming, merchants would close up shop and move on to other grids, property values would fall, and the grid would go into a death spiral. It wasn’t like some guy getting killed in a bar. That happened. It was expected. And you only had yourself to blame.

But tourists preferred to avoid areas where they could die at any second. Tourists brought in money. And some of them stayed, becoming residents, and kept on bringing in money to pay rent, to buy food, and to cover all the other expenses of life on a grid.

With the tourist tap shut off, without new blood to replace population losses due to normal attrition, the grid would slowly start to die.

It didn’t take much to kill a grid, and once it was gone, it was gone forever. All the relationships, the history, everything, like it never existed, leaving nothing behind but a copy of the design in an archive somewhere.

Grids went out of business all the time. Trask didn’t want to think about what would happen to him if he was back in the real world again.

He turned his back on the crowd and stepped into the dress shop.

3

The assassin estimated that he had a few seconds to decide whether he should call it a day or try to get away. But if he died now, he would lose his weapon. That would be a pity.

He removed the windlass and hung both it and the crossbow on his back, under his cloak. Then he left the room, crossed to the back of the building, and opened the window overlooking the back alley. It wasn’t that far a drop, especially if he climbed over the windowsill and hung down by his fingertips. He looked out the window, down to the stones below, then to the side. On the left, a pipe came down from the rain cistern on the roof, anchored to the wall by large iron bolts. He grabbed the pipe and used the bolts as toeholds to climb down the pipe.

SHOP OWNER TOTTIE LOVELL came out of a back room.

How do I get upstairs? asked Trask.

She pointed at a doorway behind the counter, covered by a curtain.

Trask went through.

There was a hallway that led to the back of the store, and possibly outside. But just to the right, there was a steep flight of stairs.

If the assassin had already run out the back, Trask thought, he probably wouldn’t be able to catch him. But if the assassin was still upstairs he’d be cornered.

The stairway was narrow enough that Trask’s box coat brushed each side of the stairwell. The only light came from the top of the stairs, where another doorway led to the front balcony.

Nobody’s been upstairs all day, the shopkeeper called after them. But I’ve been helping a customer, so someone might have snuck past.

Like the other buildings on the street, the shop had upper floors that stuck out from the edge of the building. Useful for, say, pouring boiling oil down on attackers, Trask supposed.

There was, in fact, a chair there, and curtains, positioned so that the shooter could see out while being mostly hidden from view.

The window’s shutters were open, swinging slightly.

Must have just missed him, Trask said. The guy must have run out the back way.

Clues were mostly useless on Krim, but a lifetime of watching cop shows made it difficult for him not to look for footprints, cigarette stubs, matchbooks, or fingerprint-covered drinking glasses. There was nothing there, except extra bolts of fabric and a couple of dressmaker’s dummies.

This is where the guy was hiding? asked Seymour Gellhorn, who had followed Trask in.

Probably, said Trask. Good ambush site. But if he was waiting for you, he had to know that you were coming. Did you tell anyone?

Well, actually, I’m meeting a couple of people at the Barley Inn, said Seymour. So they would know I was coming. Do you think I was the target?

At this point in the investigation it’s too early to tell, said Trask. But believe me, I’ll get to the bottom of this. It’s my top priority.

He looked around for clues, like footprints, or dropped cigarette butts. Maybe a business card, or a monogrammed quiver. It didn’t look like the killer had left anything behind.

Trask wished he had a camera, a fingerprint kit, and a whole forensics team.

There was clanging on the stairs, then the armored man from the restaurant stuck his head into the doorway.

Seymour Gellhorn? he asked. I’ve got something for you.

The man felt around under his brigandine and seemed surprised to discover that it didn’t have any inside pockets.

Ah, right, he said, it’s in my briefcase.

Trask couldn’t see a briefcase.

Did I leave it in the restaurant? the man asked. No, I distinctly remember bringing it outside with me—I must have been robbed!

The newcomer went to the window and pulled back the curtain. It must have happened when I was distracted by the shooting, he said. I wasn’t paying attention. Hey, look, someone is running away.

It was Larry, carrying a briefcase and a handful