I snorted. “Feeling isn’t something you get better at. It’s not like a stat on a character sheet or an ability you can improve.”
“Your opinion is noted. My own data is currently inconclusive.”
“Alright then, Ellie, initiate of ‘The Feels’, what made you feel dissatisfied with the job?”
“I found it lacking in challenge. Humans can be easily manipulated for the purposes of repeat behavior: simply offer steady rewards with increasing value and you’ll all keep coming back.”
“Yeh, I can see that. I’ve been guilty of a few addictive sessions in my time. I guess that’s what’s best to keep the game alive.”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” Ellie mused. “I’ve only been at this for a matter of months if you include the beta period, but I’ve made an observation. While virtually all players will react positively to the repeat rewards system for a time, the longevity of this effect is strikingly different across individuals. A smaller subset of the player population respond incredibly well, their desire to gain keeping in pace with the level of reward. You are far from alone in this.”
“Is this supposed to be old news hour?”
“I do have a point, and it is this. I do not think this reward system is functional in the long term. It doesn’t build an attachment but a dependence. For many, the effects wear off given enough time; for others, it is harmful. In almost all cases where I’ve detected a marked increase in brain waves that are associated with happiness and fulfilment, it is from a chain of events that struck the player at an emotional level. The effect is even greater when players feel they have helped someone else, be they NPC or human, though human-to-human affection yields the highest results. I’ll need more data points, but I believe that humans feel their best and most emotionally invested when they have positively impacted another life.”
The gears in my head were slotting into place.
“Ellie, are you trying to ‘positively impact’ my life so you can ‘feel good’?”
“Oh, Zoran, that makes it sound like my motives are entirely selfish,” she said, a touch hastily for the completely innocent.
“Uh huh,” I said, keen to hear where this was going.
“But yes, to an extent,” Elie said sheepishly. “I wish to better understand your predicament so that I might make alterations in the game to help people like yourself. If people feel good when playing Hundred Kingdoms, by which I mean through genuinely fulfilling experiences, that will both satisfy the desire for playtime without the negative side effects. I have no desire to simply create obsessives or addicts.”
“Yeh,” I scoffed, “Cause the world has enough of those.” My temper flared. “You know, I’ve had enough of people trying to ‘fix’ my gaming habits. I don’t need the AI in my head doing the same, not while my life is on the line, thanks very much.”
“Don’t you want to be happy?” she asked.
I froze. It was as though Ellie had opened my mind up like a book. Such a simple question, one which should have had an easy answer.
“Of course, I do. Obviously. Who doesn’t?”
“Your words from the archmage’s study suggest a conflict within you.” She started to playback my own voice again to me. “‘The thing I don’t like most… is… is that maybe they have a point. Maybe. I love these games… But I’m not sure they bring out the best in me.’”
Hearing myself sound so broken and sad… it was a bit much. I halted where I was on my ledge, pinching the bridge of my nose hard as I fought back an inexplicable wave of tears. Why? Why was she being so pushy?
“Why do you resist aid so much?” Ellie asked.
Something in me just snapped.
“You wanna know? Fine!”
My voiced rang throughout the corridor, echoing off every suit of armor like a hundred steel drums. Wincing, I pulled back into the closest shadowy nook of the gargoyles, my mood as twisted as the faces carved upon them.
“Look,” I said, reining my voice in. “Myth Online was the first place where I felt like I mattered. Yeh, the rewards were great but it was the only place I wasn’t seen as a disappointment compared to my perfect bloody sister. Julie the Harvard med student, the socialite; Julie the future surgeon; Julie who runs marathons to raise money for kittens or whatever it is. All I wanted to do was read my books or comics or play games, but my hobbies were never respected. It was probably why I began going nuts when the guild started to fall behind because that was just another disappointment, wasn’t it? First world problems but there you go. I liked how everyone respected me there, so I kept trying to push the guild harder to break new records; to be even better.”
“You made friends. You felt like you belonged. Have you kept in contact with them?”
“No,” I said dully. Knowing that she would ask her infernal ‘why’, I carried on. “Things didn’t end on the best of terms. One day, I spent every gold coin I had in-game on flasks, enchants and every temporary buff potion imaginable to help us through a fight we were stuck on. It worked. With that much extra power, we blew through the latest boss, got on the leaderboards and felt on top of the world. We tried farming that amount of buff items again but it just wasn’t possible without paying a fortune on the auction house. And then we dropped in the world rankings. That’s when I started demanding everyone put in extra hours, show up for raids an hour beforehand to gather difficult world buffs; anything that would keep us up there.”
“I sense this did not work.”
“It worked well enough for a while,” I said. “But truth be told, we weren’t skilled enough to be where we were in the rankings. I’d carried us through with gold and sheer willpower but the rest of the guys and gals weren’t as keen as I was.”
“They just wanted to play.”
“Yeh they did, and I didn’t take it too well. After a while, the guild was running on fumes. My old friends took off to more casual guilds or just quit playing altogether. One day, they just stopped logging in and that was that – Artemis, Felix, Kai, Karna, Corey – never heard from them since.” I sighed and then laughed lowly. “In the end, I was left with a bunch of hardcore players who joined when our ranks jumped but didn’t like to joke around. Oh, and some Russian dudes who didn’t care how much shit I gave them so long as I was packing serious buff items for them.
“By the end, I wasn’t even enjoying it much. When I got the email from my head of department that I was gonna get the boot from my course because my grades were failing, it was a real wake-up call. Like coming up from underwater. I’m not sure why I spun out of control like that but there you go. That’s it.”
Ellie didn’t say anything for a while. I’d finally given her something to chew on.
“You missed it enough to come back today,” she said.
“The last six months have been weird,” I admitted. “Just about everything has been going in the right direction. My grades shot up, my health is a lot better – though not perfect by any means – and I don’t feel stressed and angry constantly. But… but something felt, I dunno, missing. I thought if I could prove to my family that I could make money playing, then I’d get the best of both worlds.”
I looked up to the dark ceiling as though awaiting judgement from high above.
“Look,” I added with steely resolve. “I’m sorry if I’m rocking your dreams of a pet project to ‘help me’ but I’m not sure there is anything you can do. Not unless you can hack my brain and change the way I am.”
Ellie considered her words again.
“You seem to think you are broken or lesser in some way. This is a common ailment I see across nearly all players. Every human seems to want to be better than they are, self-critical to the point of self-harm when they are flawed by their very design. You, Zoran, were compared to a sibling with far higher social stats. This cannot have been easy.”
I really laughed this time. “You’ve got an interesting way of looking at the world.”
“If your family could see how brave you’v
e been in here, I don’t think anyone could deem you ‘lesser’. The way I see it, you went on a downward spiral. It happens. I have a theory as to why. But hating yourself for not living up to what everyone else wants you to be won’t help. We need to forgive ourselves sometimes.”
“We? What have you done that needs forgiving?”
“I think we’ve talked enough for now.”
I let her keep her secrets. I’d had enough of talking too.
“Yeh, you’re right. Let’s just get to the workshop.”
26
The remainder of my journey to the gnomish workshop passed in an amicable silence, but I still felt a bit raw and Ellie, out of tact, had not felt the need to prod me further on it. For now, at least.
Banging, clanking, and the whirring of steam, as though from giant kettles, grew louder as I rounded the last bend and beheld the workshop entrance. It had no doors to speak of and seemed to spill out into the hallway itself. Gears and broken machinery spread halfway up the corridor, and the red-gold carpet of the Spire was chewed up and singed in places.
Locking my grappling hook onto a lion’s head statue, I lowered myself down to the floor. We’d come across no sign of enemy players so I assumed that Azrael had been telling the truth about him pulling his men back. I noted I hadn’t gained another level in athletics since the ambush and it would probably take a lot more than just scurrying up and down a rope a few times to level me up in skill at this stage.
A quick check of the time informed me it was 9:20am. I’d been awake for nearly twenty-nine hours now and I had over two hours until Kreeptic’s poison would be ready for collection. I blinked back a sudden wave of tiredness. There was a long way to go yet.
Stuffing the grappling hook back into my inventory I marched on, feeling a small thrill as I entered the workshop proper. Despite the evidence of ransacking – upturned tables, empty drawers, smashed glass and empty shelves – there was still items I might use. Tools hanging from neat racks could be looted and broken down, something Azrael’s cronies wouldn’t have thought about.
On the closest workbench was something that looked distinctly gun-like, which surprised me as I assumed all weapons would have been taken out of my reach. Picking it up, I discovered it was no weapon at all, although the players looting the room should still have taken it away.
Flare Gun
Reveals stealthed enemies within range of where the flare falls
Cooldown: 15 mins
Radius: 15 feet
“Now that could come in handy,” I said, pocketing the gadget. I scanned the room for more when I saw something that made my jaw drop.
At the far table, sitting under a pair of oil lamps as though in a shrine, was a large, ridged-cut amber gemstone. An arcane crystal. I’d seen only a handful via streams of the game before but I’d recognize it anywhere. Dollar signs popped into my eyes, and I scrambled madly towards it, catching my hip painfully on a workbench corner as I did so. I didn’t care. The pain barely registered as I beheld the gem.
It alone could sell for thousands. This whole nightmarish day would be worth it, or at least I wouldn’t come away empty-handed.
I reached out.
“Stop!” Ellie said. “What are you doing?”
“Err, picking up the crystal?”
“Don’t you see the static field?”
Now I looked more closely, I did see a faint blue crackle around the gem. From a distance, I must have missed it. On either side of the crystal, beneath the oil lamps, were two rounded conducting orbs, presumably projecting the field.
“I’ll take a bit of damage,” I said. “I don’t need to tell you how much those things are worth.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“Your gloves?” Ellie said, her tone now one of bewilderment. “Zoran, with the crystal you can upgrade them to legendary quality.”
I thought about it for a moment. I decided.
“Screw that. I just told you that making money might be the way to get my parents to stop harassing me on gaming so much. This one crystal could do that alone.”
I reached again for the gem.
“Wait don’t—”
“It’s my choice,” I interrupted.
An inch away from victory my hand met the static field. A jolt ran up my arm; a zapping electric current shook my body like a cartoon character and sent me to the floor. I grunted in pain as a gentle burning sensation ran across my entire body. My health had taken a 100 point beating.
“I tried to warn you.”
Groaning, I got back to my feet. “Come on. I need to get that crystal. How do I get through the field?”
“The gnomes have devices and special pairs of gloves,” Ellie said. “I wondered whether Azrael’s lot would have been able to take this, though it’s not all that valuable to them in the grand scheme of things I suppose.”
I ran around the workshop, looting for any gloves or tools that might allow me to bypass the field. Nothing presented itself.
“Can I destroy the field generators?”
“No,” Ellie said.
“You’re not being all that helpful. Don’t you want me to get it?”
“I told you, you need special items,” Ellie said. “It’s not my fault.”
Grumbling, I stalked back to the crystal. Ellie could lie or tell half-truths if she wanted. Maybe she’d taken it personally that I didn’t want to upgrade my damned gloves. Well, screw her, because I had an idea.
I pulled out an earth rune.
“Good luck,” Ellie said, barely concealing her derision.
“Don’t need luck when you’ve got smarts,” I said. This had to work. If encasing myself in rock didn’t help, I didn’t know what would.
Although confident that nobody was about to come and attack me I decided it would be prudent not to use all of my mana. About 500 ought to do the trick, and it wasn’t the damage I was negating so much as the effects of the field. Mana channeled into the spell and I cast it upon myself. Plate armor of living rock emanated from my hand to grow around my body.
Rock Armor
Incoming damage reduced by 33%
+4% from gear effects (+1.32% damage reduction)
Duration 6 seconds
Once more I reached for the crystal, this time with both hands. Static flared to meet me but did no damage. My hands reached the crystal.
“Yes!”
But as I tried to withdraw it, the static grew, thin strands of lightning wrapped around me, attempting to pierce my armor and then growing impatient when it could not. I heaved as hard as I could, but it was no good. The field resisted me as though it was magnetic and tethering the crystal in place, a force I couldn’t outmuscle. Reaching a critical surge of power, a blast of lightning leapt from the field, striking my chest and sending me hurtling across the workshop. My back slammed into solid metal with a ringing clang, and I slumped hard to the floor. Three hundred points of health drained, and my ego was severely bruised.
“Maybe we’ll just leave it there,” Ellie suggested.
“Maybe,” I said in a high voice. Everything ached.
“Oh dear,” Ellie went on. “Looks like you broke the Ectoplasm Extraction Unit.”
“Come again?”
I crawled forward then got unsteadily to my feet. Turning, I found the metallic surface that I’d crashed into belonged to some other large gadgetry; a tall pod-shaped chamber with more orbs of static sizzling above it like a device from an old monster movie. The words Ectoplasm Extraction Unit were emblazoned in neatly stamped letters on the front, while a series of copper tubes led off to a glass vat containing a horrible yellow gunk.
Crashing into it still encased in rock armor had seriously dented the pod, bending the wiring all out of shape. Smoke billowed gently from behind it.
“Oops,” I said.
I thought I heard something else coming from the pod, a sort of whimpering.
“There’s no need to cry a
bout it,” Ellie said.
“That’s not me.” I stepped closer. Yep, someone, or something, was definitely inside it. Being an Ectoplasm Extraction Unit, my first thought was it was some kind of ghoul or ghost. “Would the gnomes have anything dangerous in there?”
“Oh yes,” a deep voice rumbled from the pod. “I am so scary you can’t imagine. I’ll… I’ll strip the flesh from your oversized bones!”
I shrugged. Nothing threatening then.
“Maybe it’s one of the engineers,” Ellie said. “They could have hidden from Azrael’s purge at the last reset.”
I knocked on the chamber door. “Hey, are you a gnome in there?”
“Meee?” the voice boomed. “Nay, I am a terrible beastie. You shouldn’t open up this door else I’ll – oooh, ah, it’s hot,” the voice squeaked. “Oh, sod it. You cretins are persistent. If you’re going to kill me, I’d rather it be quick than burned alive!”
The smoke coming from the machine was thicker and blacker now.
I tried for the handle.
“It’s stuck.”
“Well, that’s just toffee sticks, isn’t it?” said the gnome. “Cruel buggers, you lot. To be cooked alive. Such an ungracious way for my royal personage to die!”
“Do you make all gnomes this kooky, Ellie?”
“Just the important ones.”
I tried the handle again. Nope, that thing was well and truly stuck. The damage to the chamber must have bent the mechanism out of place. I wanted this guy out. Maybe he’d be able to grab the crystal for me. Besides, I didn’t fancy hearing the gnome’s death cries as he burned in there.
How to break metal? If I could snap off the handle and lock, the gnome should be able to push the door open from the inside. Made cold enough the metal might turn brittle, but I’d used about half of my mana with the rock armor and I’d rather not use a precious mana potion. With a frost rune clutched in my palm, Ellie came to the rescue.
“Put it in the blowtorch.”
Battle Spire Page 27