by Justin Coke
“Seemed like it was going well before.”
“Well, yeah, they weren’t making a dent. But your way is a better story than ‘and then they got bored and slowly wandered off to do dungeons,’ so it’s better.”
“True, true.”
“Talk to you later.”
“The demilunes worked well.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah I Googled what one was.”
“Cool,” Quartermain said, with a small smile audible in his voice. “I’m probably going to take advantage of this Children’s Crusade to get Garth, if you want to come.”
“You go. I’m running on way too little sleep as is.”
“Alright, well, thanks.”
“You too.”
Chapter Twenty
The next day, he logged into find that Garth had also fallen. He had multiple emails waiting.
Kid Twist:
WELL. I MISSED ANOTHER BIG NIGHT. FREEPORT AND GARTH FALL TO US? THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE RUNS RIOT?[75]QMAIN HAS BECOME OUR TEABAGZ, AND A MUCH MORE WORTHY JOAN DE ARC THAN HE EVER WILL BE.[76]HOWEVER, PALLADIUM POWER HAS GROWN; SQUALID IS VERY SHAKEY. ALMOST CERTAIN THAT WE’VE CROSSED THE CRABS-IN-A-BUCKET LINE, AND SHORTLY THE SHADOW PEOPLE STILL START ATTACKING PALLADIUM TO PREVENT PERMANENT POWER SHIFT IN PALLADIUM FAVOR. RUMORS GROW, AND REALLY, THEY BASICALLY HAVE TO ATTACK US. NOW THAT WE HAVE FREEPORT AND GARTH TO DEFEND, MY GUESS IS TREKOTAR FORSET WILL BE UNDER ATTACK. THOSE TREE HUGGERS HAVE MASSIVE BONERS FOR THE TREKOTAR. I DON’T GET IT, THEY’RE NOT EVEN COOL TREES, JUST LIKE, OAKS OR WHATEVER. I’M NOT AN ARBORIST.
AS FAR AS CSI IS CONCERNED, HAVING OUR OWN CITY IS FANTASTIC. DECLARE PEACE, KELLOG-BRIAND 4 LYFE,[77] PUT IMAGINE ON REPEAT.EVEN THOUGH TEABAGZ LIT THE REDWOODS UP PRETTY GOOD, HOGARTH HAD NEVER BEEN UNDER PALLADIUM CONTROL BEFORE, SO WE HAVE NO PRIOR CLAIMS TO HONOR. IT’S A TOTAL CLEAN SLATE. $$$$$$$
WE SOLD EVERYTHING TO THE REIT FOR PEANUTS, AS PER GUILD POLICY ON CONQUERED LANDS, AND WE’LL BE KEEPING THE BEST STUFF FOR OURSELVES, SELECTIVELY HANDING OUT THE GOOD STUFF TO OTHER GUILDS TO ENSURE A FACTION-WIDE CONSENSUS TO DEFEND HOGARTH, AND SELLING THE CRAP TO THE HOI POLLOI. SO EVEN THOUGH THE REDWOODS WENT UP IN SMOKE, IT SHOULD BE A BANNER MONTH FOR THE REIT. EVEN IN IT’S DEPRESSED STATE THE TAX REVENUE IN HOGARTH IS IMPRESSIVE. ONCE THE AUTOMATED DEFENSES ARE BROUGHT UP TO SPEC (WE COMMISSIONED QMAIN TO DESIGN THE DEFENSES), BEING THE DUKES OF HOGARTH SHOULD BE A PROFITABLE VENTURE.
I WAS ALMOST THROWN OUT OF THE GUILD OVER THIS; NOW I’M LIKE, THE FONZE OR SOME SHIT.
BACK TO BUSINESS. TARGET IS LIVID. PISSED. INFURIOUS. WHATEVER. I THINK THE SQUALID LEADERS ARE REALIZING THE KID MIGHT BE GOOD FOR BUSINESS BUT THAT HE ISN’T REALLY MANAGEMENT MATERIAL. WE’LL SEE HOW THEY HANDLE HIM. DOESN’T SOUND LIKE HE MESSED UP FREEPORT, MORE SOUNDS LIKE HE NEEDED ABOUT 10 TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE TO MAKE A DENT IN THAT WEIRDO’S[78] RAVELINS AND DEMILUNES, BUT I SUPPOSE TARGET’S INHERENT CHARM AND MATURITY HAS BECOME OBVIOUS. DOWNSIDE, HE MOSTLY MOPES AND RANTS ABOUT HOW CYCLONE LOUIE AKA KID TWIST AND QUARTERMAIN ARE CONSPIRING AGAINST HIM (ACCURATE) AND HOW THE ELITES ARE TRYING TO SILENCE HIM (EHHH ... Accurate?). UPSIDE IS SQUID PISTOL HAS RETURNED TO THEIR HOLDINGS ON THE SP BORDER AND ARE BACK TO ... WHATEVER. SO WE CAN START CHASING THAT DOWN AGAIN.Hayes sighed. He didn’t look forward to infiltrating that forest again. He’d probably just find out that Teabagz and his buddies went out into the forest to pound off in the nighttime or something equally useless. Still, he couldn’t let Teabagz win, and his defeat last night was, at most, a minor setback. Teabagz was still better off because of Hayes’s attempts at revenge, and even if Hayes’s ardor was waning, it wasn’t waning enough to leave things that shitty. He messaged Tick Tock and they set up the Eagle Eye again, this time at the top of an unburnable cliff that provided an adequate view of the river.
Chapter Twenty-One
Tick Tock furiously suggested he get on Marconi.
“I got it, I got it,” Tick Tock said. “I figured it out.”
“What?”
“Teabagz and his crew have a vault in the forest, it’s under the water in the stream that runs through their land. They put whatever it is in the vault, wait half an hour, and then some Shadow People come get it.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why wouldn’t they just give it to the Shadow People? Why wait half an hour?”
“Clears the log.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Mundis server is very parsimonious when it comes to data storage. After a while it forgets why an item is in a place, and only remembers that it is there. Sort of like the real world.”
“What?”
“Like, a baseball doesn’t know it was thrown by Randy Johnson. It just was. The fact that it was thrown by Randy Johnson can be deduced from the information contained in the ball, like trajectory and velocity, but it isn’t necessary to the ball’s being a ball. Once the ball stops moving and Randy goes to the locker room, how can you tell who threw it? It’s contingent.”
“This sounds like philosophy,” Hayes groaned.
“Point being, contingent information gets purged pretty quickly. After a while the ball is just where it is, like in the real world.”
“Okay ... ”
“I.e., it becomes technically impossible to prove who put what in the vault. At least from the server logs. Add in some masking of who is operating which account, and life gets hard for the cops.”
“Ah ... oh.”
“So this is some real life crime shit for sure, is what I’m thinking,” Tick Tock said.
“Really?”
“They’re going to really elaborate lengths to hide something. Bots pretending to be gold-farming bots but never mailing gold, this vault system. It’s all about identity laundering. They’re trying to make it hard to build a legal case against them.”
“Should we call the cops?”
“Hi, sir, there’s this douchey kid from Florida, and he does weird things in the fake forest with his fake friends,” Tick Tock said in her lispy nerd impression. “Please stop taking screen caps of idiot’s Facebook confessions and investigate something I’m basically telling you can’t investigate.”
“Like you think they’re terrorists or something?”
“They could be doing anything. Anything. They’re for real though. I mean, it takes discipline to keep doing this. My cousin is a cop, and he says most criminals can barely boil pasta.[79] I don’t like it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I don’t want the Cali Cartel knocking on my door because I interrupted their money laundering or whatever the fuck this is. We said we’d stay away from real crime shit. This is getting real close to the line for me.”
“You really think Teabagz works for the Cali Cartel?”
“He’s working for someone who likes their privacy and has enough money to keep Teabagz in high roller status for no other reason, that I can tell, than to keep him busy. I’m just a poor girl in the middle of nowhere. I can’t afford to eat at Chili’s. I ain’t interested in getting a fight with someone who can spend $500 a month just to keep a douche like Teabagz out of their hair.”
“So you’re out?” Hayes said. He was disappointed, but he couldn’t hold a grudge against her for it. Hell, deep down he kind of hoped they’d make the decision for him.
“We’re going to talk about it, my vote is that we drop it. At most bang out the no-curse kill and move on. If I wasn’t 100% that my Eagle Eye can’t be traced back to me, I’d be flipping shit right now.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mad Hatter found him later that night.
“We talked about it,” Mad Hatter said.
“You’re bailing?”
“Kid Twist made a fairly convincing case for him being the annoying kid of a gold farmer. One of the multi-server ones. That Teabagz being on this server is like, I don’t know, one of Mitt Romney’s kids getting to manage the dressage horses or whatever. A thrown bone. That all the secrec
y was just them respecting the fact it’s bad business to just rely on Typhoon to never do anything about their bullshit.”
“You believe it?”
“No,” Mad Hatter said, “I really don’t. I can’t put my finger on why not, but I don’t. I think it’s because Teabagz reminds me of me a lot more than he reminds me of the rich guy’s kid.”
“Did Tick Tock?”
“She voted to bail. Kid Twist voted to stay.”
“You?”
“I think he’s involved in real life crime shit, but I don’t care. In fact, I dig it.”
“You dig it?”
“Yeah, I do,” Mad Hatter said. “It’s like, I don’t know, it’s like, the one thing that keeps Mundis from being perfect is that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that much. I mean, Whoratio sold his account for a hundred thousand dollars, Zoh ma Gawd MMO gold rush and shit like that. He’s the Warren Buffet of Mundis, right? You know what his /played time is? Seven hundred days. Plus change. Seven hundred days! That’s not eight-hour days, either. That’s twenty-four-hour days. That works out to less than minimum wage![80] Warren Buffet makes more taking a shit than our Whoratio Buffet could make in a lifetime.[81] I don’t even want to think about my hourly wage as a Cultist. It might beat what I could make writing fake reviews on Amazon, but not by much.”
“Where you going with this?”
“Deep down, I know it’s all bullshit. It’s scrawling graffiti in a bowling alley bathroom and telling myself I’m Michelangelo. Lately, I’ve been thinking about ... going back to school or something equally depressing. Getting on a dating site. Worrying,” Mad Hatter said, suppressing his gag reflex, “worrying about what people would think about me at the high school reunion. Dark, dark thoughts.”[82] “Not getting it.”
“The possibility I might get real life shot means ... It means it matters now.”
“And this makes you feel good?”
“The possibility of death gives Mundis that cutting power it hasn’t had in a while,” Mad Hatter said, voice tightening in a way that made Hayes squint. “The hot penny stench of blood has opened my sinuses and widened my eyes. I can feel my adrenal glands perched on top of my kidneys, singing battle songs. I can feel it cross the blood-brain barrier. My blood burns with the hopeful joyous hate of embers ready to burst into flame at the slightest whiff of oxygen. I can smell the number blue.”
Hayes made a scared face at the computer screen, but no one was there to see it.
“In short, my friend, I’m fucking loving it.”
“What next then?”
“We go rob that vault.”
“Can we do that?”
“Absofuckenlutely,” Mad Hatter said. “No lock in the game can last more than five minutes when I’m picking it.”
“Five minutes? That’s all?”
“Yeah. Only thing is,” Mad Hatter said, voice quivering with that strange excitement, “the owner of the vault knows the instant you start trying. No way around that. So I need five minutes of safety with that vault. If I get hit, I have to start over.”
“So ... wait for Teabagz to log off?”
“But there’s probably nothing in the vault when he’s offline,” Mad Hatter said. “We have to get it while there’s something in it. While they’re guarding it. We’ll have to make them watch me penetrate their vault against their will.”
“And all they need to do is hit you to reset the clock.”
“Yes.”
“You have a plan?”
“I do,” Mad Hatter said, close to humming. “I do.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“The plan,” Mad Hatter said to Hayes and Quartermain, “is this. We let them discover Hayes’s rogue trying to sneak around the vault. Hayes, you run. Hopefully they will follow. Whoever follows you gets jumped by QMain and the rest of Sir Digby, and they handle the body control there.
“Anybody who doesn’t chase you gets chevalier pulled as far away as possible, then killed. When they resurrect, same pull and kill. We’ll have a skirmish line to shut down reinforcements. I have a bodyguard around me as a last ditch.”
“How many people does all this take?” Quartermain asked.
“I figure, like, twenty-five ought to do it.”
“You’re going to get twenty-five people through all that Squalid territory undetected?”[83] “We’ll do the standard warlock gimmick, of course. I’ve even called in a favor with a neighbor of Teabagz. He doesn’t know what the chit will be yet, but he’ll come through, so we won’t even have that far to infiltrate.”
“You already know Teabagz has a source inside Sir Digby from the wheat thing.”[84] “Random Marconi chatter I think. Not worried about him finding out after we do it. He’ll already know by then. We just don’t tell people until it’s too late.”
Quartermain harrumphed.
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t like plans where the enemy has to behave a certain way. What if they just see Hayes, pop him out of stealth, and sic the guards on him? What if they have a class that can slow Hayes down enough for the rest to catch up? Now we’re the party that has half of us out in the woods waiting to ambush, and the other half just doubled the people it has to deal with. Don’t split the party.”[85] “What’s your plan?”
“Bring fifty, rogues ambush to keep them from getting the loot out of the vault, the rest just charge in, kill everyone. Use body control to form a tight circle around you and give you time to work. The non-bot population of Squid Pistol isn’t enough to stop it, and this way we don’t need them to think the way you think they should think.”
“You got the people?”
“If it’s a quick summon and smash,[86] yeah, I can get as many as we need, but I can’t emphasize this enough—do not tell people what you’re planning on doing. If it leaks, even ten minutes ahead of time, you’re just going to get a vault of horse manure and a rude haiku,” Quartermain said, his tone one of an annoyed professor. “We already know Sir Digby leaks.”
“They found out afterwards.”
“Last time Teabagz was universally hated, not some weird Robin Hood like he is now. Odds are he’s better informed now.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful. I won’t tell anyone what we’re doing.”
“Kind of hard to coordinate without some talk beforehand.”
“Okay, Q, handle it how you want to handle it, okay? Or if you don’t want to do it just say so, I’ll find someone else,” Mad Hatter exclaimed, befuddled. “Why all the sand in your vagina?”
“Guy was ready for the no-curse thing and clearly suspected you guys, and for good reason, by the way.”
“So?”
“I’m getting the feeling he’s either smarter or luckier than you,” Quartermain said. “Which would mean I’m backing the wrong horse.”
“Good thing you can’t really die in game,” Mad Hatter said. “Grow a fucking pair. If we get our ass kicked, we get our ass kicked. Big deal.”
“Yeah,” Quartermain said, “yeah, you’re right.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
His Squalid rogue having been cut from the picture due to Quartermain’s revision of the plan, Hayes waited for his summons in Londinium on his warlock.
The runs through the heroic dungeons had gone well; the drops had kitted him out in respectable, but hardly notable, fashion. Hayes had noticed that his eye for fashion had changed; as his gear improved the people wearing whatever collection of quest greens they happened to be wearing began to look sad and clownish, while the people draped in orange looked majestically terrifying. He couldn’t quite remember what they had looked like before, but he knew it had been different.
Regardless, he was soon huddled in a cave tucked into the base of a little valley along with about twenty members of Sir Digby and twenty random people from a variety of guilds. Hayes recognized most of the guild names, and in any case he was the worst geared person in the group, which made him feel like the plus one to someone’s work p
arty. Nobody was rude to him; his guild tag was enough to keep that from happening, but he could sense judgment. High-level Mundis players were incredibly catty and judgmental.[87] The rogues had moved ahead and had been in position around the vault since before the summoning had begun; scouts reported that Teabagz had just left the guild manor and was heading to the vault.
Players began to leave the cave and mount up, anticipating the command to move out.
It felt like a long time in coming, but finally it came.
“Action in 3 ... 2 ... 1,” Quartermain said. The riders began to burst out of the ravine and into Squid Pistol territory. Alarms tripped; guards began to chase them, but they were ignored. Making it to the vault was more important than a little damage.
They came upon a scene of carnage: a dead Teabagz and his two dead friends. Mad Hatter was standing by the vault, his character repeating the same five-second lock picking animation endlessly as heavily shielded tanks formed a wall around him. The rogues entered stealth, turning into pale outlines that cruised in circles, looking for enemy rogues.
Several minutes passed.
“Two more,” Mad Hatter said.[88]Teabagz resurrected, his body turning into a skeleton. He leapt forward, trying to get a shot off on Mad Hatter, but he was cut down by half a dozen spells.
“One more,” Mad Hatter said. “Oh shit, it’s a doozy.”[89]It was then that the horde of Squalid players appeared to the east, riding through the forest at top speed, while another group of Shadow People appeared in the west, converging on the vault.
“Teabagz called in help. Keep me safe for another thirty seconds.”
The wave hit, encircling the bodyguard of chevaliers, who had closed in so tightly around Mad Hatter that to hit him, you must kill one of them—which they tried very hard to do. Jostled and mostly useless, Rabaul just flung spells as best he could as the enemy simply ignored him in the efforts to burn down a single chevalier. After a moment, the targeted chevalier dropped in spite of all the help his healers could provide. A rogue moved into strike; Hayes cast fear and sent him screaming away. The circle of Chevaliers tightened to protect Mad Hatter.