"It's part of that strategy Ash laid out," he said. "The fewer monsters you have in battle, the more experience they get." He paused, thinking. "It would actually work even better if you only put in one monster against two weaker ones, but right now those two are pretty even in a fight. It really could have gone either way."
Nika nodded. "So Ash is concentrating on getting all the experience she can for FireStorm and Boxy Fox, and Louella is doing the same for VeggieMot and Flippin Frog. I think I understand now. Once we get ready to join forces, we can trade out the strongest ones into the main team."
"That's the plan," Dean agreed. "The only problem that I could see ruining it is if we have to join forces in a hurry and don't have time to trade monsters first."
"It might not be a bad idea to trade the strongest monsters into a single team every night before making camp," Evan said. "That would help lessen the risk of losing the stronger creatures."
Dean looked impressed. "Not bad, old man."
Evan looked affronted. "Hey, I'm only a few years older than you are!"
"I stand by my words," Dean said, grinning at him. "You're over thirty, right?"
"Barely."
Dean shrugged. "Still counts."
Striker had followed the short conversation with interest. He had seemed rather uninterested in the monster battles, but now that they were talking age, he perked up considerably. Probably because he thought he had an advantage over both of them.
"And just how old do you be?" Striker asked Dean, a smug grin on his face.
"Twenty-six," Dean said. "A long way from old-man thirty."
The dwarf's smile brightened another notch. "Well, we dwarves consider anyone over a quarter of a century old almost ancient." He turned his brilliant smile to Nika. The man truly was gorgeous. Just way too short for an Amazon. Of course, she had Blake to thank for Striker's undying interest in her. He'd been programmed for her as a joke. Nika didn't find it funny.
The dwarf had almost died saving her life back in Forest, and she'd grown fond of him. Giving him a smile of her own, she asked the question she knew he was waiting for. "And just how old do you be, Striker?"
He stretched his height as far as it would go and said proudly, "Twenty-two years of age. Years before the old man quarter century."
She laughed and then noticed that Dean had grown quiet. "Is something wrong, Dean?" she asked, looking around to see if there was something she had missed.
"I never thought about it that way," he said softly. "I'm a quarter of a century old."
"Lighten up," she said. "Like you said, you've still got a long way before being an old man of thirty."
"Hey!" Evan said. "Thirty is not old. I'll have you know my grandfather is ninety and still going strong. I'm in my prime."
Striker snickered. "Almost a third of a century old, you are," he said. "Prime my behind."
"Why you little..."
"Hey, what's going on up here?" Ash asked as she and Louella reached the top of the stairs.
Thankfully, they had made good time. Nika was very glad to see the two step onto the rooftop. Now maybe they could get on with the player battles and distract the men from their battle of the ages. Why did age matter so much to men? Especially now, when if they didn't get out of this game, they might not even live to make it to another birthday, anyway.
"Nothing much," Nika said, brushing off Ash's question in the hopes that the men would drop it. "Let's get back to why we're up here."
Louella looked at the men and gave Nika a questioning glance but didn't comment on the situation.
"We picked up extra potions so we wouldn't have to go to the clinic in between the next battles. We can save it to the end."
The girls took turns battling Nika, who used their approach and only brought out Munch to each battle. Surprisingly, he could win even over two of the other monsters. His starting ability was just called Hyper, but when chosen it turned him into a virtual whirlwind of claws and teeth. The attack did major damage and didn't seem to really care which element it was up against. Very useful, indeed.
When the battles were over, Nika was very pleased to learn that the girls had been right. Player battles raised the experience bar a lot. Nika had gone from halfway to level five all the way to level six. That meant she had regained her All Out attack which could come in very handy against the desert creatures. Plus now she had the map again. She hadn't wanted to go far at all without that. With it, they could tell when they were coming up on enemies. Now they could venture out a bit farther.
The girls went from level three to just shy of level five. A few more experience points and Ash's heal would be back to level five and that would give her even more confidence in her party's chances.
"You said we can battle each player once a day," Nika said. "Does that mean literally every twenty-four hours, or can we battle right at sunup?"
"If they haven't changed it from the online game, a day counts from sunup to sundown, so yeah, we could battle first thing in the morning to give our monsters an up in level for the day," Ash said.
Nika frowned, thinking hard. "Is there a limit as to how many times we can trade? And can we trade the same monsters back and forth?"
"As far as I know there isn't a limit on trading. You can trade as often as you like with whomever you like." Ash frowned. "Actually, if you decide to keep something like this in your game, that's something I would recommend changing. It could make it easy for groups like us to manipulate the contest."
Nika grinned. "That's good to know. In our current situation, I'm glad that faulty code exists."
She was working on a plan. They needed all the strongest monsters on a single team when they ventured into the desert in case they had to join up with little to no warning. But, having the monsters with different recruiters meant they would get more fight time and thus level up faster.
The only compromise that Nika could come up with was to trade out the stronger monsters back to Ash and Louella every morning, do their team battles, and then trade them back into the main team before they headed out. The only bad thing she could think about that was that the girls would only have lesser monsters to hunt with. It would hurt their chances of getting more monsters. Of course, right now there were only a few types in each location. Hopefully, that wouldn't end up hurting them too badly.
As they headed down to the clinic to heal their critters, over to the save fountain, and then out to the gate, Nika laid out her plan for the others.
Ash and Louella both thought for a minute and then nodded.
"It sounds like the best plan for the situation at hand," Louella said.
"Should we trade monsters before we head out?" Ash asked. They were standing at the gate. If they were going to do a trade, now was the time.
Nika hesitated but eventually shook her head. "Evan and I have access to the area map now, so we can keep an eye out for desert creatures. That should help us avoid any battles. We can go a little further this time to see what else is in this area, but I still don't want to go too far yet." She grimaced. "As much as I hate to lose a day, I'd say we spend the rest of the day and part of the night collecting monsters and getting them as strong as possible, then start out first thing in the morning. If we are level ten by then, we should be able to make some real progress at that point."
Hopefully not having to stop and look for creatures to fight would make their journey through the desert much faster. The Trials add-on should help them be level twenty or higher well before they reached Gaia in her caverns.
At least that was her hope.
Just after stepping through the gate, Louella hesitated. Nika stopped to look at her. "What is it?" she asked. Surely going just a little farther wasn't giving the girl second thoughts?
"I was just wondering about the map," she said, frowning. "Red dots mean monsters. Aren't the Trials creatures considered monsters in the game too?"
Oh, hell, the girl was right. Nika pulled up her area map and sure enough,
there were little red dots in the grassy areas nearby.
Damn. So much for being able to avoid the bigger desert creature monsters. If they avoided all the red dots, they wouldn't find any critters to add to their inventory.
"It appears they are red dots too," Nika said slowly. "New plan everyone," she said. "Why don't we try the other gate and see if there are any different monsters to catch over there. I really don't want to go into the desert half blind to enemies."
Louella looked relieved. Nika couldn't blame her. She had a lot more than the rest of them riding on this.
Maybe, anyway. No way to know for sure at this point. They were all on borrowed time.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Mirror Revelations
Les and the others met at the twins' apartment after work in the morning. The apartment was tiny but suited Max and Mary well. They shared a bedroom, each with their own separate twin bed. A curtain that they had fashioned to divide the room for a bit of privacy hung from the ceiling between the two beds. It was as close to two bedrooms as their limited shared budget would allow.
Besides the small bedroom, the apartment only had one other room. It held a smaller sized couch, a stand with an entertainment terminal on it, an extra cushion for a guest to use as a chair, and an extremely tiny kitchenette. The entire kitchen could be accessed by a person without having to take a single step. The two burner stove with half oven, the tiny refrigerator, and the equally tiny one bin sink were all crammed into one corner of the room.
They made the most of what space they had. As most of the lower income level apartments these days, theirs too was located in a large house that had been converted to rent space out for others. As such, they shared a bathroom with the other two apartments located on the second floor. That's one of the reasons they had decided to work nights. It made bathroom access much easier as they were sleeping while most of the other renters were their most active.
Les shared space still with his family, but there were a lot of nights when he slept on the twins' couch. Mary wasn't complaining one bit. She liked having him around. A lot more than she'd admit to either of the men.
Attached to the entertainment center was an access console that allowed them to get to their online games and to watch movies and videos. As soon as he walked in the door, Les started fiddling with the station, hooking his terminal up so that its screen would be shown on the larger one that they could see easier.
Mary went into the kitchen and grabbed some fruit and graham crackers for them to munch on for breakfast. She had enough of kitchen work during the night to want to spend time in one of a morning. Especially one this small.
She curled up on the couch, taking one end cushion and curling her feet up under her. Watching Les finish up his project, she smiled. Most of the work required him to bend over and the view was definitely worth watching. Best of all, Max was too busy changing clothes to notice her attention.
He always changed clothes first thing when they got home. Not that she blamed him. Some of the cleaners that he had to use on the job were pretty potent. When he came back out to join them, he smelled much nicer.
Max noticed the plate of food on the table and smiled at his sister. "Hey, thanks," he said.
She gave a half shrug. It was nothing. Normally their apartment was a strictly get it yourself kind of place. For some reason, today felt a little different. Maybe it had something to do with all the tension in the air.
Though what Les thought they could do if they did find evidence of wrongdoing by Cora and her crew, Mary didn't have a clue. They couldn't exactly go to the authorities and say, "Hey we planted a highly illegal mirror chip into a computer and used it to find out these people are up to no good."
That would go over well.
Unfortunately, what worried her was that she was absolutely sure Les had a plan in mind. And she was also absolutely sure that plan would land all three of them in a massive amount of trouble.
Once he had the hook up done, he came to sit on the middle cushion with his terminal. Each of them had their preferred seat on the sofa and the middle spot was always reserved for his cute, tight little tush.
He grabbed a handful of grapes, or what passed for them now, and started popping them into his mouth as he keyed one-handed. It slowed him down a bit, but not much. The man had a talent. Within a few seconds, his screen was mirrored up onto the larger entertainment monitor. After several more keystrokes, the screen blinked and changed. They were in one of the crew's computers.
It took Mary a minute to decipher what she was seeing. The screen was split into two different views. One was static, and the other was a work in progress. The person keying on the terminal back at Gaia was copying the coding from the static side into another file. But why on earth would they do that? There were much simpler ways to copy programs and files.
Then she noticed the name of the file at the top of the static screen. It was tiny print, but it showed that the code was from Gaia's Rebirth NPC programs. Then it all snapped into place. She had heard rumors that Nika's father, Cameron Logan, had made incredible advances in software security. It was said that the only way to steal from Logan was to literally copy his code line by line. To make the task even more difficult, the only way to access the original coding was to sign into a terminal directly linked to the Gaia Corporate network.
My God, she thought. They're stealing Gaia's Rebirth.
From the noises on either side of her, she knew the boys had reached the same conclusion. But again, what could three recent college graduates with menial jobs within the company do about it? They had no authority, and the evidence they now had couldn't be shared without getting them into a lot of trouble. Plus, it was obvious that Cora had very deep pockets if she had managed to arrange all of this. Who knew who all might be in on it? Surely, she wasn't acting alone.
"They're stealing Gaia," Max said, stating what was now obvious to them all.
"Yeah," Mary agreed. "Poor Nika, she goes into the beta test and when she comes out, all her code has been copied. Talk about a drop in stock prices."
"I think there is more at risk than stock prices," Les said slowly. "You've all heard the rumors about VirTech haven't you? That they'll go to any length to get a game they want?"
Mary looked over at him in horror. "Cora is with VirTech?" That was one evil corporation. They had been brought up on charges ranging from corporate espionage to outright murder, but nothing had ever been proved against them. The company had walked away from every courtroom free as a bird and a whole lot richer.
He nodded. "When I was placing the mirror chip into the terminal, I noticed a logo on the computer. It looked familiar but at first, I couldn't place it. I did some research on my last evening break. That terminal is the property of VirTech."
"Ah, shit," Max said. "People say they don't leave survivors."
Les nodded grimly. "That's why I say there is more at risk here than just money. I don't think they plan to let Nika and her party out of the game." He paused. "Think about it. She's the sole owner of the company now that her father passed. And Blake, her new husband, is now missing... maybe dead for all we know. Taking her out of the picture will give them a lot of time to plan their next move once they have that code copied."
"A lot of people have played Gaia's Rebirth online," Mary said. "Surely VirTech doesn't think they can get away with releasing a carbon copy of the game?"
Les shrugged. "If it were me, and I had all the codes and the hard stuff already programmed, I'd change just enough to make my game unique. It would still be based on Gaia, but with several tweaks, it wouldn't take all that long to have another game ready to market. And good luck proving it includes Gaia's code."
"Plus, they now have Logan's software protection program too," Max said. "That in itself has to be worth a fortune."
"Good catch," Les said. "I hadn't thought about that."
"Do you really think they are going to kill Nika and the beta testers?"
He took a deep
breath before he answered. "Yeah, I think their days are definitely numbered. Once they have the code copied in full, they won't want to have them around causing problems." Another deep breath. "There is always the possibility that Gaia's Rebirth won't be safe either. Why leave a competing game up and functioning?"
What better way to cover your tracks than to destroy the game during the beta test. Kill the game and the people inside all at the same time.
"We have to do something," Max said. "We can't let them get away with this."
"Come on, guys," Mary said. "What can we do? Seriously, we only know what we know because we placed an illegal device into someone else's computer. And if we give the evidence over anonymously, who can say if the recipient will act quick enough to save the company?"
Les turned to her, a bright smile on his face. "Good thing I have a plan, huh?"
Oh, lord. They were in so much trouble.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Ash and Tyler
Ash had noticed Tyler was acting a bit off all day. Well, actually for longer than that. She had hoped maybe it was simply the change in game play and that he was feeling unneeded as there weren't any monsters that he could help fight. To try to make it up to him, once they had made it in for the night, she had booked a room at the inn for the two of them. Nothing like a nice cozy room at the inn with a soft bed and plenty of privacy.
The team had done well that afternoon. As it turned out, the other gate's area had offered up one additional monster, which they each managed to add to their inventory. Tomorrow they were going to do an early morning hunt as Nika and Evan had done this morning in the hopes that maybe there would be an additional nighttime monster there as well.
Even as familiar as she and her fellow beta testers were with the Trials game, they simply had no point of reference here in Gaia as to where each monster type would appear. The areas just didn't correspond at all to the other game.
That actually put a little fun and adventure into it for Ash. She was really enjoying the change of pace and starting to get back into the monster collection mode. If only it had been her who had found that Munch, it would have been perfect.
Desert Page 12