Extra Credit Read online

  Extra Credit

  By J. Arthur Klein

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  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, game systems, monsters, religions, grammar, mythologies, nightmares, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 John Klein

  Edited by Mindy Klein and Adam Guenther

  Cover artwork by ivanterribly2 on fiverr.com

  To all the teachers out there who don't get nearly enough credit for your dedication to our kids. I hope one day society appreciates you as much as I do.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  Epilogue

  Ending Character Sheet – Kababala

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  More LitRPG Groups

  LitRPG Marketplace

  1

  “Time’s up!” I announced, resulting in a collective moan from the class. With a quick keystroke, I ended the exam, causing the class terminals to auto-submit each student’s answers so far and close the exam software. Almost immediately after, the bell marking the end of the period rang, and the class began to pack up their things, celebrating their release into the wild for Spring break.

  “Hold on, give me a minute before you go,” I said, waving them back to their seats. “Since this is your senior year, I decided to give you a gift for Spring break.” A couple of students looked skeptical, knowing my sense of humor. I flashed them a grin and said, “Grades from this exam will be posted to the parent portal on Monday…”

  There was a collective groan, and I saw several students looking a bit more worried than the rest, so I made a mental note to look at their exams manually later on.

  “… when you return from break,” I said, concluding my announcement.

  It took them a minute for that to process, and when it did, those worried looks brightened a bit.

  “Have a great break. Stay safe!” I concluded and granted them their freedom.

  “Nice one, Mr. Salvado,” David Zalinski, one of the early groaners, said as he left my classroom. “See you after break!”

  I closed the door behind the students and returned to my desk, opening up my workstation and loading the exam software. I made sure all of the exams had been submitted and then hit the big green “Grade” button to run grading software.

  Almost immediately, the results popped up, showing a plethora of graphs and charts of the class’s performance with breakdowns for almost any conceivable category. I read through the overall results and smiled; everyone had passed.

  Even the students that had seemed worried at the prospect of the grades being posted during break had gotten at the least a C. I manually flipped through each student’s answers, making sure the automated system wasn’t cheating them out of any points and then set the results to be published as promised.

  Gathering my own things, I shut down my terminal and headed out, locking the classroom behind me. The hallways of Smithville High School were virtually deserted as the students and teachers rushed out to a well-deserved vacation.

  The drive home was uneventful, the self-driving car doing most of the work as I tried to keep my mind from dwelling on my own issues.

  I had been living my dream. I’d graduated from college with degrees in History and Economics and landed a great teaching job at Smithville teaching World History. The pay was decent, and I was able to score an assistant coaching position for the varsity basketball team as well for some extra cash.

  I met a wonderful woman named April at a local Karaoke Bar after embarrassing myself with a heartfelt rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and before I knew it, we were married and moving into our dream home.

  Between the two of us our expenses were covered, and we had a pretty decent nest egg building in our savings account. A year or so later, our family of two became three when we welcomed our son Diego into the world. Things were looking pretty good.

  And then they were not. Recession hit, the inevitable fallout of a decade of warring political parties finally trickling down to the general population as a steaming pile of dog shit. The school district’s budget got slashed by almost forty percent and the teachers were given the option of either a significant pay cut or walking papers.

  Even the power the unions had gained after the shutdowns at the beginning of the decade was insufficient to counteract the sheer lack of funding in the system.

  A brief search for another teaching position in the area was fruitless, and with a mortgage to pay, going elsewhere in hopes of finding something better was just not financially possible.

  We budgeted, cut back on some of the extraneous things, and made do. The mortgage was paid, we were fed and clothed, but we no longer had any surplus income to put into savings.

  And then the other shoe dropped. My assistant coaching position was cut with no warning. Now you would think that an optional, extracurricular position would have been slashed before the district resorted to a giant pay cut, but you’d be wrong.

  As with many schools in the U.S., preferential treatment was given to the sports programs, and the basketball team had to have its budget. But even that had its limits, and eventually every department had to pony up a bit to keep things going. My position was this year’s sacrifice to the budget gods.

  Now we were deep into our savings, trying to find a way to climb out of our deepening hole. This week was going to be my “Hail Mary” to find a new and efficient supplemental income to put us back in the black and make it so we wouldn’t have to sell our dream home.

  This morning I’d kissed my wife and son goodbye as they headed out to her mother’s house for the week, leaving me to focus on my plan.

  My wife was skeptical at first, but I had done as much research as I could with the information that was available on the net. I put my economics degree to use, creating spreadsheet after spreadsheet, analyzing the market trends and the speculation about the numbers behind it all. The promise was there, but there were still a lot of unknowns in the virtual world of Argos Online.

  The regulation of digital currencies had morphed over the years after the boom in the early 2010s, and once the gov
ernment got their finger into the pie and started taxing transactions in the industry, their greed propelled it forward. Now all transfers of digital currency and property into USD were completely legal, so long as you paid the five percent transaction tax to good old Uncle Sam.

  Soon I would be putting on a VR headset and starting my new trial run of working the markets of Argos Online. I had one week to learn the particulars of the game, refine my character to the point where I could test out my theories, and hopefully show a successful business model.

  I was no slouch when it came to gaming. Well, at least I hadn’t been back in my high school and college days. VR was a lot different than the old school MMOs of my youth, but I figured that the basic terms and functionality would have a lot in common with my experience. At least I sure hoped so.

  ***

  2

  I arrived at home and made myself some dinner. We’d stocked the house in preparation for my staycation with good, high protein food guaranteed to keep me full while I was logged into the game.

  While I ate, I read through the manual for the VR headset that I'd rented for the week, reviewing all of the controls and activation instructions I’d need to know. The headset was a model XC21-G, which was close to the top of the line model.

  Via some means that was beyond my scientific understanding, this thing could hijack your brain and make you experience everything in the game as if you were physically there. When I had started researching the viability of my theories after overhearing some of my students talk about how they couldn’t wait until they turned eighteen and could cash in their “loot” for real money, I looked into the technology involved.

  After the third paper about the interactions of delta waves and alpha waves and the subconscious vs. conscious minds, I called it quits and decided that the VR tech was fueled by magic, and that was that.

  After dinner, I cleaned up after myself and headed up to my bedroom to get ready for my first foray into VR, changing into my pajamas and getting comfortable on my bed. I smiled at the picture of my wife and son hanging on the bedroom wall and took the first steps on my quest to secure our future. This is for you guys.

  One of the bonuses of the VR technology was that it allowed your body to rest while your mind was playing the game, letting folks replace some of their normal sleep with game time while still getting the down time their bodies needed.

  The conscious mind would still need some actual sleep, but you could probably get by on two to three hours a night if you didn’t go too crazy.

  I set my alarm for 5AM and put on the headset, planning to play for the next eight hours and then log out for a few hours of actual sleep.

  Adjusting the straps and making sure everything was lined up correctly according to the manual, I reached for the power switch, then sighed and started unhooking the connections. Of course, my body had decided to wait until I was ready to dive into a virtual world to have to pee.

  I ran to the bathroom, emptied my bladder, and sprinted back to my bed. I got the headset back on, strapped myself in, and hit the power switch.

  Lights began to flash within the helmet, and I felt my eyes getting heavy as the world faded, leaving me floating in blackness. Seconds later, a grid of icons sprung into existence in front of me, reminiscent of a smart phone menu, but in three dimensions.

  I searched through the icons for the one I wanted, bypassing the popular streaming services and browser programs like Bookface, Tweeter, and MyTube.

  There it is, I thought as I found the icon for Argos Online and mentally tapped it.

  When the login screen came up, I entered the username and password that I’d set up on my lunch break via the game’s website and watched the world swirl away to be replaced with a loading screen.

  Loading Argos Online

  Everything went black except for a single point of light in the distance. I felt myself speeding towards that light, the feeling of motion a bit offsetting as the only visual indicator was the light itself, growing rapidly with each second.

  With a flash, the motion stopped, and I found myself standing in a bright white room. Before me was a wooden desk, behind which sat what I could only describe as the world’s most stereotypical fantasy wizard.

  He had a long, flowing white beard, pointy gray hat, and robes. In one hand he held a long-stemmed pipe, and his other hand was idly tapping a large tome laid out on the desk before him.

  I cleared my throat, startling the wizard.

  “Whoa now! Don’t scare an old man. I can’t help you through character creation if I’m dead of a heart attack, now can I?” he said in a shaky voice.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what to expect from this experience and well, it surely is something.”

  The wizard took a long drag of his pipe and looked me over, dismissing my apology with a wave of his hand. “Think nothing of it, adventurer. Now… let us get started while I’ve still got some life left in me,” he said, and took another puff from his pipe.

  He snapped his fingers, transforming our surroundings into a large white room. Arrayed in a semicircle before us was a series of pillars, and standing on each was a sculpture of one of the races available to players in the game.

  “Examine your options, adventurer, and find the one that calls to you. There are many races that make up the peoples of Argos, each with their own history and flavor, so take your time. Should you have any questions, feel free to ask and I will be happy to help.”

  The wizard gestured to the pillars and turned his attention back to his book that had reappeared in his hand.

  There were a lot of options available, including the standard human, elf, dwarf, and orc found in most fantasy settings as well as a few custom-made for the Argos game world. But I didn’t bother looking at those, or any of them, really. I had a plan.

  I searched through the selection and looked for the race I’d determined to be the optimal choice for my current endeavor, and after a brief hunt, found it tucked into a corner near the back of the room.

  I shook my head and chuckled a bit as I took my first real look at the avatar for the kobold race.

  Standing at a towering three feet tall, the reptilian humanoid had large, solid-colored eyes and small horns protruding from the top of its head. Its short snout ended in wide nostrils, and its mouth boasted a set of sharp, pointy teeth that would make any carnivore proud.

  Small, leathery scales covered it from head to toe, and a long whip-like tail extended from its backside. The tail was wrapped around the example avatar’s feet, resting next to a set of dangerous looking talons that matched the claws on the kobold’s fingers.

  From what I’d read, the kobold race was unpopular with the general player base which made its out of the way location in the selection room make sense. They had a pretty significant penalty to their survivability with only a slight boost to mana to make up for it.

  However, they did have some innate bonuses which benefited gathering skills that I was banking on helping me achieve my goals. I would gladly deal with being small and crunchy if it helped me solve my current financial issues.

  Base Race: Kobold

  Rumored to be distant cousins to dragonkind, this diminutive race seems far from the majesty of their kin. These small, horned, reptilian humanoids live apart from the main population centers, usually in small underground settlements, where they seek to avoid those races who would prey upon their weakness.

  Kobolds are physically weaker than the other races, and frail. While their bodies are weak, magic runs in their blood, and like their rumored kin, kobolds have the capacity to develop a larger mana pool than the sturdier races.

  Kobolds are scavengers and sometimes find value in things that are seen as trash to the other races. Due to this, they have a slightly increased chance to find rare materials while using gathering skills.

  Racial Benefits:

  -Bloodline: The one remnant of their rumored draconic ancestry, kobolds have an affinity for
magic and gain a bonus to their mana pool.

  -Diminutive: Barely coming up to the waist of some races, kobolds are small and harder to hit as a result. Their small size also grants a bonus to Stealth.

  -Subterranean: Living predominantly underground, kobolds have innate Darkvision allowing them to see in complete darkness.

  Racial Detriments:

  -Diminutive: Due to their small stature, kobolds are unable to wield normal tow-handed weapons that are not specifically crafted for their race. All other weapons count as one size category higher for kobolds. For example, a normal one-handed long sword would be a two-handed sword for a kobold.

  -Frail: Being small of stature, kobolds suffer a permanent penalty to both hit points and endurance.

  -Subterranean: Living predominantly underground, kobolds are sensitive to light and suffer penalties to hit while in bright light.

  Racial Skill:

  -Scavenger: Able to find worth in things that others view as trash, this skill gives kobolds a small chance at salvaging usable materials from otherwise worthless things. When looting or performing other gathering tasks, there is a chance that additional materials may be obtained.

  Before I could have any second thoughts on my choice, I called out to the wizard, “This one.”

  He appeared next to me with a puff of smoke and looked at the kobold with some skepticism. “Are you sure?” he asked and raised an eyebrow.

  When I nodded, he shrugged and said, “Well, to each their own.”

  He snapped his fingers, and my perspective started to shift. I began to shrink, or the rest of the world started to grow, but either way at the end my point of view was barely waist high on the wizard, and the world seemed extra bright.

  I squinted against the light and the wizard snapped his fingers again, dimming the ambient light to a tolerable level.

  I stumbled to the side as my center of gravity shifted, things feeling much different from what I was used to. I leaned forward slightly and dropped my tail a bit and finally regained my center.

  Wait, what? I could feel and even control my tail. This is amazing! How can I feel a tail?