by Justin Coke
[20] Enough for a wild weekend.
[21] Enough to start a Stone Cold Creamery. (sic)
[22] Kid Twist was nineteen. He’d never tell anyone in Mundis, but he was super famous. He was talking to Hayes from the penthouse of a hotel that charged more for a night than Hayes made in a year. He was in one of those boy bands that teen girls threaten to kill themselves over if they don’t just come out and admit they’re gay already. He was the nerdy one because of the massive gaming laptop he always had with him. Kid Twist was actually one of those rare freaks that can handle enormous amounts of wealth and fame and shitbag narcissistic parents and somehow get driven wise instead of crazy. It’s indicative of how toxic his life was that the most grounded and sane thing he could think to do with his spare time is to obsessively plot the defrauding and assassinations of total strangers for sums of money that he had literally spent on on lunch earlier that day. He always let Mad Hatter keep his cut of the Cult proceeds. But Kid Twist derives a lot of satisfaction from the fact that there are people out there who like him just because he was fun to play with, and that they’ll still like him once his band turns into a punchline. Point being, if Kid Twist gives you advice, it’s probably good advice.
[23] Mad Hatter was 32. If he’d put half the effort he put into Mundis into anything else, he’d have been really good at it. But he didn’t. Do not take advice from Mad Hatter unless it involves talent specs or THC. He takes Kid Twist’s share and doesn’t feel bad about it even though he has no idea Kid Twist is rich as hell.
[24] Tick Tock is a seventeen-year-old girl being raised by a deeply religious family who would immediately ban Mundis as Satanically inspired if they had the mental capacity to understand it was anything more than Super Mario Brothers. She loves that band Kid Twist is in. If she knew who Kid Twist really was, she would lose her goddamned mind. She has dreams about Kid Twist’s Squalid Berserker singing to her that make her very uncomfortable. When she has one, she pretends her mic is broken for a couple of days so she doesn’t have to talk to Kid Twist.
[25] Teabagz is that guy that everyone kind of hated but had been in the social circle so long that they always ended up invited to everything anyway.
[26] Where the publicly traded assets of the Palladium Faction were bought and sold. There were two kinds of assets on the Exchange—government bonds that were effectively backed up by Typhoon itself, and utter shit. The rest of the assets were so shady and criminal that buying assets on the Exchange was viewed as being in the same vein as falling for a Nigerian email scam. The freedom of Mundis required the ability to rob your investors blind; Typhoon’s desire to not have to have a thousand securities lawyers on retainer meant they didn’t care enough to stop it. You invested by buying bonds, buying land and assets directly, and buying through your Guild (and only then if it was a Guild that had been around for a long time). That had been drilled into his head from day one.
[27] Theoretically possible; at this stage of the life of Swann’s Way, basically impossible.
[28] Each piece of gear was made of three elements: the material, the craft, and the art. The Squalids had the best material, the Palladium Fraternity had the best craft, and the Shadow People had the best art. Combine the three, and you can throw off the whole calibration of the game in your favor because the game was designed for players to have only one of the three. Once one guild did it, the relentless competition meant everyone else had to do it too. Typhoon sat back and let the children play while everyone giggled over the number of zeros in Typhoon’s quarterly earnings.
[29] The counterargument there was that if trading was banned, people would just load themselves up with cash or goods, drop Graverobbers, and let themselves get killed by their business partner and effect the trade that way. They claimed the corruption was baked into the freedom, and to have the freedom you had to have the power to abuse it.
[30] Pick-up group; a semi-random assortment of people. Sort of like how if you got nine people together to play softball, a PUG was barely a team and would get steamrolled by more serious groups. But by virtue of being able to communicate, a PUG beats the groups of randoms they usually fight.
[31] Short for Battle Ground; a gladiatorial competition between teams of players.
[32] A very high rating. If this were football, they’d win the division.
[33] Essentially accurate. Kid Twist is the guy who came up with the name CSI: Londinium.
[34] Battleground players were sorted into teams by level; a level 89 would be the highest level player in the 80-89 level battlegrounds. Give that character nicer gear than normal and you have a twink. A twink’s real world equivalent would be a Civic SI with a cool spoiler. Or maybe bringing in your cousin who plays on his community college basketball team to be a ringer at the company picnic.
[35] http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/04/health/no-sleep-brain-size/
[36] Hayes was too inexperienced to realize how big a favor Kid Twist had done for him until later. CSI: Londinium was one of the top five guilds on the server. They were rich as Croseus, and regularly provided the healers for the Imperium Rex end game. How impressive that is will be explained later, but trust me, it’s really impressive. If Kid Twist was a regular member he would have gotten kicked out a long time ago for going off on weird side quests instead of helping the guild, because the Thrill Kill Cult was his true guild. But he was the last Ice Cream Kid, which is inexplicable nickname the guild had for the founding members of CSI. Sentiment aside, winding up Kid Twists financial involvement in the guild would have been bureaucratically on par with dissolving the Ottoman Empire, so what he wanted, he got. Enter Hayes.
[37] Typhoon had created a rather complicated drag-and-drop legal system that the server automatically enforced. However, these documents quickly became so arcane and contingent that if you hired a lawyer to explain one to you, he’d be able to pay for his kid’s braces by the time he was done. At the end of the day, Mundis ran on people’s desire to look their friends in the virtual eye. Most guilds required real life names and addresses of anyone in a position of responsibility so the threat of extra-Mundis retaliation would keep people honest just in case looking people in their fake eyes wasn’t enough. Several people had ended up in the hospital over intra-guild white collar crime since Mundis had come out. As a result, Typhoon had released a series of PSAs about how you shouldn’t beat your guildmate’s real ass over fake money.
[38] “Our Sorathi crystals are worth 5 million,” Catmandu said earlier that day. “Poopmaster Flash got on Marconi this morning. His mom isn’t grounding him anymore,” Colossus said.
“So?”
“Poopmaster stole 500 of those from that Shadow People guild ... I can’t remember who, Immortan Joe’s Misguided Children? Something Mad Maxy. Anyway, he stole them just before he got grounded. Now that he’s back he’s put them up for auction.”
“How’d he steal that many?”
“Saw a guy playing at a LAN party, when the dude went to piss he got on the computer and mailed everything in the Guild Bank to his alt.”
“Is that what he got grounded for?”
“Nah. Mom caught him jacking off.”
“Well. We just lost a shitload of money.”
[39] Actually, Typhoon’s algorithms had detected a normal number of three-to-five minute play stoppages that indicated that something with a bladder was controlling the character, so this was an empty threat.
[40] An annual return on investment of almost 20%. In the real world that would have made Bernie Madoff blush. In Mundis it barely kept pace with inflation.
[41] Stress, tension, and fatigue can cause the brain to overcompensate for the loss of automatic balancing reflex from fatigue. This can lead to dizziness. Hayes had been leveling so hard he hadn’t put any job applications in anywhere, even though he had no intention of getting his old job back and he had already maxed out the first emergency credit card and was now living off a new one. His last paycheck had barely covered the rent, and h
e had an overdue electric bill but he was pretty sure they’d give him until next month to get caught up. His mind kept returning to the five-thousand-dollar investment account he’d inherited from his Great-Aunt Liddie. He’d kept that thing through an enormous number of financial scrapes, unexpected car repairs, and ER visits. That CD was his financial Maginot Line, and it looked like the Huns were just going to invade the Netherlands and flank it. He kept telling himself he’d send out some applications, maybe look at finally going back to wrap up his BS in chemistry, but it seemed like it only occurred to him to do after 4:00 a.m., and by then he was too tired. A quiet part of him was wondering if moving back in with Mom was really worth getting revenge on Teabagz.
[42] The canon is very specific on that point, possibly to nip the carping about incorrect orbital mechanics in the bud.
[43] A pretty standard tank and spank, Orto was little more than a test to ensure that the raid group had the raw power to compete. The last time a raid group had failed on Orto, most of them had transferred servers to avoid the shame.
[44] The twins played an interesting game of deceit: one used a brutal ice attack, the other a fire attack. Anyone who hadn’t stacked enough elemental resistance would die instantly (and you couldn’t have ice and fire at the same time). The twins would occasionally disappear for a moment and reappear in new clothes. If your ice team got on the fiery Morgrath, you lost your ice tank and half the DPS, and the fire team now had to handle the ice boss as well. In short, if you guessed wrong you all died. There was always one consistent difference between the two; maybe a mole on their cheek, or their hair was combed different ways. The difference varied with each attempt and you just had to figure it out before you engaged.
[45] Bolot was untankable; he attacked healers first (a squishy and easily killed bunch). This boss was all about body control; instead of trying to control the boss, the tanks and DPS players had to create a maze with their bodies to allow the healers time to run away. It was basically like trying to create a corn maze on the fly while trying to murder someone. Bolot separated the players who had memorized the optimal DPS and healing rotation and the players who were truly capable of teamwork. Bolot was arguably harder than Kirash the Omega for that reason, and one of the primary arguments against the All-Star team selection method favored by the Palladium Fraternity, since team chemistry was more important than individual skill.
[46] The beauty of Imperium Rex as the endgame is that it really united the faction. The group of low-level casual players who popped on to play a dungeon or two contributed to the success of the whole faction. Given their huge numbers, their contribution was actually larger than the hardcore players, at least in the opening PVE rounds. Everyone was helping, and everyone was rewarded. Each player’s contribution was noted, and they effectively had a share of the faction’s reward. For instance, a Shadow Person who had run a couple of dungeons would wake up this morning to a bit of gold in their mailbox. The people who had fought in the battlegrounds that helped establish control of the hallways and fortresses inside the Imperium would get gold and tokens for PVP gear; the second tier guilds who had cleaned out the 10 and 20 man raids necessary to unlock the Final Door would be well compensated, while the people who actually went through the Final Door would receive a small fortune. Since they only got to Bolot and lost all their gear (when you go through the Final Door you either leave the victor or you leave defeated and naked), that small fortune probably represented a staggering financial loss. Beregrath the Insipid represented the point where the loot was enough to pay for a new set of tier 2.
[47] Getting out damaged by the tank was like losing a pull-up contest to a 300 lb man. Just embarrassing.
[48] Once again, due the prevalence of cross-faction accounts, if he’d openly appeared off the public road, he was liable to getting his ass kicked. The automated guards had no compunction about faction loyalty. This sort of situation is exactly why virtually everyone had a rogue; their ability to disarm traps and alarms, combined with the mage’s invisibility (limited to a small radius while standing still), were absolutely vital to open world PVP. Alone as a rogue, his only real concern was keeping the dogs from finding his scent trail, which dissipated quickly.
[49] The warning was from Mundis; no one in Strong Spirits had been notified of the intrusion.
[50] Sic.
[51] He actually made his rogue sit by a tree because it was more comfortable than standing. In terms of game mechanics this was an utterly meaningless gesture, but perhaps was proof that Hayes had started to over-identify with his character. Earlier that day he had nearly spent $150 for a hand-painted model of his warlock. The main thing that stopped him was that he wanted to wait until he had full tier 2. Getting his portrait done in quest greens seemed like a waste of money.
[52] Here Kid Twist was debating whether to try to talk some sense into Hayes. On the one hand, ripping Teabagz off wasn’t going to teach him a lesson. Whatever was driving Teabagz to act the way he did, whether it was teenage hormones or a shitty parent or a personality disorder or all three, it wasn’t going to get changed by being virtually humiliated. If anything, the fact that Hayes cared that much would just validate Teabagz’s behavior. On the other hand, Kid Twist was seriously worried that the only thing keeping Hayes from sticking his head in the oven was his obsession with Teabagz. If Starbuck had convinced Ahab to leave the whale alone, what was left for him? Ahab’s obsession existed because the pleasures of the world had not been enough to calm the fury that had chosen the whale as the symbol for evil in the world. Without his fury, his reason to live ended as well. At least Ahab had had a family and a career, which was more earthly consolation than Hayes had. Dousing the obsession might be the same as killing the obsessor. Kid Twist, as well as being in a huge boy band, was incredibly handsome, fabulously wealthy, and also very well read. No homo.
[53] A potion, meant for Black Ops, that hid the name and guild of the Character taking said potion. It was great, except for the fact that everyone instantly knew you were up to no good and shot you on sight.
[54] The answer, in short, was the immense amount of wealth that got left on the floor (as literally as one can be when the floor is virtual) in Imperius Rex. The wealthier the player, the more money he lost in Imperius. Typhoon had a team of economists constantly tweaking the model to create an economy that allowed for, even demanded, outrageous levels of consumption, and funding that consumption by printing the money need to fund it. Because Typhoon could simply patch Mundis to match their economic theory, it was an economist’s dream job. The externalities of this system (namely, Hayes’s credit card debt) didn’t show up on Typhoon’s quarterly reports, and so, from their perspective, didn’t exist.
[55] Two economists walk down the road. They see a pile of horse manure. “I’ll pay you $20,000 to eat that dook,” the first economist said.
The second economist runs the math.
“Okay,” he says, and he hoarks that horse apple.
They walk down the road and find a dog turd.
“I’ll pay you $20,000 to eat that dog shit,” the second economist says.
“Okay,” the first economist says, and he gobbles that turd.
They walk some more.
“You know,” the second economist said as he spit for the 100th time since he ate that horse manure, “seems like we have the same amount of money as we did at the start, but we both ate shit. I think we made a mistake.”
“Ah,” the first economist said as he bent over, getting ready to puke, “you aren’t accounting for the fact we just boosted the gross domestic product by $40,000.”
[56] Colossus is a 28-year-old rocket scientist. He is gay and plays Mundis because it is hard to have a love life at the White Sands Missile Range, especially when your CO is rabidly homophobic. He’d basically applied for every job at SpaceX and landed an Avionics Hardware job that would start after his contract with the Department of Defense ran out in six months. As a result, he feels like a
prisoner at the tail end of sentence, desperately wishing life had a fast forward button. For now, his guild duties and his randyblue.com subscription are keeping him sane. When he lands in California, he is going to download Grindr and become a ludicrous slut for a few months to make up for lost time.
[57] A bit of both; Colossus enjoyed to the chance to do his R. Lee Ermey impression with a good chunk of his awful CO mixed in. He’d considered making a Trump 2016 t-shirt for the drill sergeant but hadn’t gotten around to it before the election and didn’t find it nearly as funny now.
[58] The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. Kid Twist’s band used them to license and collect mechanical royalties, i.e., somebody was trying to stiff Kid Twist out of money. Kid Twist was very paranoid about getting Don Kinged by his manager, so he always made sure he was on top of stuff like this, even though it pissed his manager off to no end. Kid Twist felt like his bandmates were so addled by fame that they encouraged people to take advantage of them. He stayed up at night worrying about ending up like Blue, MC Hammer, UB40, Jerry Lee Lewis, David Crosby, Marvin Gaye, Lisa Lopes, and many others he had Googled repeatedly. He wasn’t even born yet when Willie Nelson released his album “The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories,” but he was well aware of the dangers of trusting other people to manage his money. He made damn sure his accountant paid his taxes and didn’t get too cute about it either. When his band followed the inevitable boy band career path of becoming a sad joke (he gave it about 18 months; his bandmates all thought they were Michael Jackson reborn), he wanted to be living in a mansion somewhere with great scuba diving, not doing appearances on Celebrity Boxing. He wanted to be in a position to negotiate a great payday for the nostalgia tours that would kick off around 2032, when his fans would be in their early thirties, have two kids, a deep seated desire to relive their youth, and the disposable income to be high rollers at the merch tent.