by A. J. Markam
Because the boring device was a piece of machinery and not magical in any way, it had passed by the Mage’s scan earlier. I had been worried that he might have sensed some sort of energy source within the sphere, but that worry had proved unfounded.
I had thought just placing the boring device in the safe itself, which would ensure it couldn’t be found by the bank staff – but I immediately discarded the idea when I realized there would be no way for me to get out of the safe once I emerged from the tunnel. And I wasn’t going to be able to slide a thousand-pound safe over a couple of feet so I could crawl out of the hole. There were other problems, too. Even if we tried to dig our way in a few feet to the side of the safe, the boring device was going straight down beneath it. When we excavated the tunnel in, there would be no guarantee the floor wouldn’t give way, sending a thousand pounds crashing down on our heads. No, digging through the floor just a few feet away from the safe was definitely the best option.
The device’s timer was already going, and was set for the next morning at 11 AM. Everything had to be timed exactly down to the second – which was both terrifying and oddly reassuring. When you have one thing that can’t be changed, you can build everything else around that. Otherwise you’re left with a floating sea of variables that nobody can quite get a handle on.
The device was going to make a huge amount of noise, which couldn’t be avoided – but at least I could help it out by starting the excavation process.
I reached back inside the ten-slot bag and pulled out eight vials of acid. One by one I poured them out on the stone floor, letting the corrosive liquid bubble and work its way through the slate into the underlying layers beneath. Once the bubbling liquid was a good two inches below the floor’s surface, I took out the final piece – a thin sheet of copper – and placed it over the hole. Then I put the gnomic boring device on top of it.
The Rat had promise me that it would cut through the metal like a knife through tinfoil. Once it did that, it should drop into a hole that would be at least a foot deep – which hopefully would dampen the sound.
The air was full of the acrid stench of the acid eating away at the rock, but there wasn’t any visible gas billowing up out of the hole or anything like that. I quickly gathered the satchel, put the ten-slot bag back inside the slit, slipped out of the room, and pulled the door shut behind me.
The elf was waiting for me out in the hall. “Is everything to your satisfaction?”
“Yes – thank you.”
The elf nodded. “Good. I’ll escort you out now.”
68
Monday Morning
Morningstar Inn
“Alright, so you’re going to cut a tunnel up through the floor of the bank vault,” Arkova said. “But when they hear the orb go off, they’re going to investigate, and that’s the end of the plan.”
“We’ll deal with that in a minute. First let’s talk about how we’re going to make it so Jen can teleport out of the bank.”
69
Wednesday Morning
Shadow Bank
The elf nodded. “Good. I’ll escort you out now.”
“Actually, can I get a tour of your facility first? I’d like to know that where I’m putting my money has good defenses.”
The elf frowned. “A bit late for that, isn’t it?”
“Not for the next 15 million my associates back in LA want to deposit, it’s not.”
“No one mentioned that on the phone calls we made,” the elf said.
“Yeah, because I’m the guinea pig. They don’t want you people hard selling them until they know they can trust you.”
“Fifteen million dollars, you say?”
“Yes.”
The elf made a quick mental calculation of his 6% cut, then nodded. “Right this way.”
As we walked, he told me about the building’s defenses. “The walls were built with steel plates inlaid between stone. It’s virtually impermeable to anything less than a full-scale attack.”
Or a gnomish boring device, I thought.
“The bank itself is guarded by a rotating staff – Warriors, Hunters, Mages, even Rogues.”
“Really?” I said. “I don’t see them.”
The elf stared at me blankly.
“That was a joke,” I said. “I’m a Rogue, so… Stealth? I don’t see them? Because they’re invisible?”
“Oh,” the elf said, in a voice that suggested nothing but contempt for my little joke.
“I saw you have a bunch of snipers on the roof, too,” I said, changing the subject.
“Yes. To dissuade any ground attacks.”
We went up the stairs to the second floor, which was full of nondescript doors. We walked until until we reached a door that was virtually indistinguishable from all the others, except for the number outside it: 100.
“This is where the magic happens,” the elf said. “Literally. Inside are the magical scrolls, artifacts, and powers source that create our internal array of spells that guard the facility from magical attack, teleportation attempts, and other forms of unapproved ingress.”
“Can I see?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why are you so curious?”
I shrugged. “Who’s to say you’re not just telling me there’s a whole bunch of amazing stuff behind that door, when there really isn’t? Maybe you guys are relying on your reputation, when actually your reputation is the only thing keeping people from trying to rob you.”
The elf drew himself up to his full height. “That’s an outrageous accusation – especially from a new customer.”
“If a big company was considering doing business with Google, and they wanted to see all the computers Google uses to run the internet, Google wouldn’t show them what’s on the computers – but they’d probably at least let them see them, right? Especially if seeing them made it easier for the company to make their decision.”
“Google does not have ‘computers that run the Internet,’” the elf sneered.
“You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been in prison for six years. I kinda missed out on the whole technical revolution thing.”
“Google has been around for decades.”
I smiled. “Ah, what do I know? I never made my money by investing or building companies – I just stole it from the people who did.”
The elf looked at me warily, like he wasn’t sure what to make of that last comment.
I wasn’t going to push it any further than I already had. If he didn’t want to show me what was behind the door, it wasn’t worth trying to force him. It would only arouse suspicion. And at least I knew where to come once I broke in.
But he seemed to have been at least moderately impressed with my little speech about stealing other people’s money, because he knocked on the door – two short raps, three slow, then three more short. A very odd pattern. I took note of it.
“Yes?” a disembodied voice asked from within.
“Open up. I want to show a new client what he’s paying for.”
A bolt retracted, the iron door groaned open, and a wizened old man with a long beard peeked out. A Mage, by the looks of him. “Yes, sir?”
“Stand aside,” the elf said imperiously.
“Yes sir,” the Mage said obsequiously, then stepped back from the door as the elf opened it wide.
The room really wasn’t much more than a glorified safe room, just with a heavier door, a bolt inside, and a guy keeping watch. The room itself was maybe two or three times the size of the one I’d just rented.
A small explosion in there would probably foul everything up. Which was precisely what I was counting on.
“We’re not going in,” the elf said, “but you can see the various defenses.”
There were quite a few of them. Arcing towers of electricity, pedestals with glowing orbs that shot out rays of light, intricately colored patterns of gemstones on checkerboard grids.
“So this’ll stop anybody from teleporting in or out?”
“Yes.�
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“What about running in or out?”
“No. The force fields necessary to surround an entire building would require us to continually shut it off every time someone left – and a spell for something large could require ten minutes’ casting time. Our defenses would be down more than they would be up. Which is why we have the guards, the snipers on the roof, and all the physical barriers instead.”
I wasn’t about to arouse suspicion by asking, What about tunneling in from under the ground? The fact that there wasn’t some kind of barrier around the building was good enough for me.
If something went wrong, I figured it would happen when the gnomic probe started up. If somebody heard it, it would ruin the mission, but… oh well. Better to get away early than get caught late in the game.
“All right, looks good to me,” I said.
The elf raised an eyebrow. “You have training in magical defenses?”
“No, but I need to tell the other guys back in LA I did my due diligence. I figure I just did.”
The elf nodded at the Mage, who closed the door and clanked the bolt back in place.
With that, the elf led me back down to the first floor in the main lobby.
70
Monday Morning
Morningstar Inn
“How are you going to deactivate the defenses?” Arkova asked.
“With these.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out several grenades – the ones I had received during the quest to destroy the Dark Ossuaries. They were the leftovers that Jen, Slothfart, Richard, and Russell had given me.
“Hey – we still have some of those!” Slothfart said.
“And I’m going to need all of them. Just to be on the safe side.”
“You still haven’t explained how you’re going to get inside the bank,” Arkova said.
“We’re coming to that.”
71
Thursday Morning - 10:46AM
The Sewers Under Sillomar
I stood in the sewers underneath Sillomar, trying to ignore the stench of the murky waters flowing around my feet. For a game where nobody ever went to the bathroom, the game designers sure did spend a lot of time and effort on making sure they got the smell right on the imaginary poop.
I told myself as I stood ankle-deep in the water that even if it soaked through my boots, I was dead – it wasn’t like it could hurt me. And so far, I hadn’t seen any evidence that there were bacterial infections in DarkWorld.
On the other hand, I was basically ankle-deep in shit. That was enough to ruin anybody’s day. So instead I focused on the task at hand.
Given where I was standing underground, the Shadow Bank should have been right overhead. ‘Should’ being the key word. The problem was, I wasn’t exactly sure. Even if I was underneath the bank, I had no idea whether I was dead in the center, under the safe rooms, or underneath the elf’s office.
Of course, that’s why I had my two companions along with me.
Joe the Rat’s mining hat was glowing at full brightness as he inspected the sewer walls. “Oh yeah, this should be a breeze. See this brickwork?”
He pointed at the vaulted ceilings above us, which seemed to have more in common with a medieval church than they did with any sewage system I’d seen in the real world.
“This is gonna be a snap to go through. They didn’t build this on bedrock or nothin’. I can get through this no problem.”
I looked at the other guy, who was one of those half-human, half-goat people you see in old cartoons playing panpipes. Big horns curled out the sides of his head, and a bushy beard grew from his jawline. His skin was a light orange color, and he had glowing yellow eyes.
He was the Earth Mage – which meant he had all sorts of spells that affected stone and soil. Other than looking like a cross between a tangerine and the devil, he seemed pretty okay.
“You’ll be able to tell where the probe is when it comes down?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” the Earth Mage said. “I can feel the rock and soil all around us. My senses don’t go past the barrier they’ve put in place in the floor – ”
“Whoa – what barrier?” I asked, alarmed.
“Relax, it’s not a force field or anything like that. It’s more along the lines of a cloaking device for the magic inside. Physical objects like the probe should be able to get through.”
“Oh,” I said, relaxing only slightly. “That’ll work.”
“Damn straight it’ll work,” Joe the Tunneller said. “And even if it don’t, I still get paid.”
The Earth Mage coughed.
“Uh, me and him still get paid,” the Rat amended.
“Fine,” I growled, then checked the ornate timepiece I held in my hand. 10:47 AM.
Thirteen minutes to Go Time.
“That borer’s gonna make a hell of a racket when it starts up,” the Rat said. “You do know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you gonna do when they hear it and come runnin’?”
“We have a little something planned so they don’t.”
72
Monday Morning
Morningstar Inn
“That’s where you come in,” I said to Arkova. “We basically need to do an aerial bombardment of the bank, starting a few seconds before 11 AM.”
“‘Aerial bombardment’? You mean drop explosives on them?!”
“Yes.”
“Exactly how am I supposed to do that?”
“You’ll use your manticore to take four bombs up into the sky, one in each of its paws. You’ll position yourself exactly over the bank – and then you’ll drop the bombs one after the other, with maybe five seconds in between.”
“Why?’
“Because we need to cover the racket that the boring device is going to make. If there are explosions rocking the building, they’re not going to be paying attention to some clanking and grinding sounds in one of the safe rooms.”
“Where are we going to get explosives?”
“Give me a break,” I scoffed. “This game is like the most corrupt Third World country imaginable. If you want something and you’ve got enough money, you can buy it.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Okay, that’s basically true. So you’re going to be paying for the bombs out of the five million in gold?”
“Exactly. Which is how I plan on paying for everything else, too.”
She shook her head in dismay. “The Bureau is going to have my head if this doesn’t work.”
“But if it does, just think of the shiny new corner office you’re going to get.”
She glared at me. “That’s not why I’m doing this.”
“Good – then all the risks are worth it. So quit complaining and do your part.”
She looked furious, but she didn’t say anything.
I have to admit, telling her off was one of my favorite moments in the game so far.
“Okay,” she conceded, “let’s say you get the probe through. Then the Tunneller gets you inside. But there are still guards.”
“That’s why we’re going to need a diversion.”
“A diversion? Against Level 50 guards? Who are you going to send up against them?”
“Trash mobs.”
“What?!”
I turned to my friends. “Remember the Dark Ossuary and the skeletons?”
“Oh yeah,” Jen said.
“Oh my God, such a huge pain in my ass,” Slothfart snorted.
“Not as much as the sword is going to be,” Richard said.
“Don’t do that,” the orc whined.
“What, state the obvious?”
“Guys – focus,” Jen said, then turned back to me. “What about trash mobs?”
“The skeletons were what, Level 5 or something?”
“If that.”
“I remember they had about 50 hit points apiece.”
“Yeah…?”
I could tell Jen could see where I was going with this
.
“What if we had 60 or 70 guys attack the bank at once? It doesn’t matter if they’re Level 10, or 15, or 20 – all we need is a shitload of them to rush in and confuse the guards.”
“Okay – but how are we going to get 60 or 70 people to attack the bank?”
“By buying them drinks.” I turned to Slothfart and Russell. “Which is where you two come in.”
“Dude – you mean we’re going to help the mission by getting a bunch of guys drunk?” Slothfart asked.
“Basically.”
“Sign me up, mate!” Russell exclaimed.
“I LOVE the FBI!” Slothfart yelled, then glanced at Arkova. “Oops – sorry. Uh, I LOVE your friends!”
She glared at him, then looked back at me. “Leaving aside the ethics of what you’re suggesting, exactly how are you going to get 60 or 70 people to make a suicide attack on the Shadow Bank?”
“Well, for one thing – free drinks,” Slothfart said, like it was obvious.
“Maybe we could promise them nudie bars, too?” Russell asked with a waggle of his eyebrows.
“We’ll see if that’s in the budget,” I told him. Then I looked back at Arkova. “The main thing is, the 70 guys aren’t going to know that they’re attacking the Shadow Bank. Nobody knows it exists except for high-level criminals, right? Because the Bank masquerades as a guild. That’s what you told me on my first day in Sillomar.”
“Oh my God… that’s true…” Arkova realized.
“So it shouldn’t be too hard to convince a bunch of drunk dudes to prank some stuck-up guild in PVP battle mode… especially with these two leading the charge.”
“Damn straight,” Slothfart said proudly. “I only regret that I have but five beers to drink for my country.”