by Justin Coke
[59] Tick Tock had told her family that Mundis meant to remember that Jesus had died for the sins of the world. It was Latin, which her mother automatically associated with Jesus (her mother had never heard of Catullus). So that had helped, though not much, since Mundis wasn’t approved by the Governing Body and so was automatically suspect. However, her mother couldn’t really grasp the concept of an MMO, so she let it slide. The second thing she had going for her was that she lived on the top floor of the house and her mother was pushing 400 pounds and rarely climbed the stairs anymore. When she did, Tick Tock had about five minutes of wheezing and thumping to just turn the game off. Her dad, who was both stealthier and marginally more intelligent, was a bigger threat. One day when she had faked the flu to avoid going door to door, she’d installed a simple pressure sensor under the carpet on the stairs and wired it to turn on the JW.org Limited Edition Wall Light her mother had bought her in December (a total coincidence in no way caused by latent guilt about not celebrating Christmas). That gave her warning when her dad was coming up the stairs, long enough to tab over the copy of Watchtower she always kept open as a decoy. Aside from Mundis, she hangs out on the /r/exjw subreddit, and she keeps her Thrill Kill Cult earnings in her secret PayPal account. If they knew she had that money, they would a) take it and probably give it to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and/or QVC, b) take away her computer, and c) she’d show up as sad story about Satan influencing children through video games at the local Jehovah’s Witnesses conventions. She was mostly worried about a) and b). She’d figured out the Witnesses were full of shit ages ago. Much like Colossus, she was counting down the days until she got out of jail. Her ACT score got her a free ride to a private college in Milkwaukee, and the day she graduated high school she was buying a Greyhound ticket to Coachella, dropping a letter to her Kingdom Hall requesting that she be disfellowshipped, and spending the summer before college making up for lost time. Her parents would shun her for the rest of her life, but the way she looked at it, that was on them.
[60] Theocratic Ministry School, i.e., the worst night in the whole Jehovah’s Witness liturgical calendar. She dreaded Tuesdays more than anything else, even going door to door. Her sixth sense was telling her that if she skipped any more meetings for a while the elders would start leaning on her parents to worry about her soul, which meant more Bible studies, and more parental supervision, which was about the last thing she wanted.
[61] Resolving the Harry Fox issue, then a sixteen-hour flight to Japan (the lag inherent in satellite internet made playing Mundis difficult over the Pacific), then rehearsals for their Asia tour. Kid Twist was going to be busy for a while.
[62] That didn’t stop him from fantasizing about finding Teabagz and taking a baseball bat to his acne-riddled face. His mental picture of Teabagz was Scut Farkas from “A Christmas Story,” and he was deeply convinced a beating would do Teabagz a lot of good, or at least be an enormous amount of fun. He’d probably get away with it too, since the police would have no idea how to connect him to Teabagz. They’d chalk it up to Florida being Florida and let it go.
[63] The Bloody Wake began when Stinkbug, a popular Squalid Chevalier, hung himself in real life. His guild, Band of Brothers, decided to throw a cross-faction wake for Stinkbug in the Burning Wasteland (Stinkbug’s favorite zone). It started out very nicely; hundreds of people gathered from all the factions and hung out, reminiscing about Stinkbug, his exploits, etc. It was a moment of peace and friendship and humanity that the cutthroat world of Mundis had never seen before. So CSI and a few other Palladium guilds decided to participate. They all got on their horses and formed a column, carrying the Band of Brothers banners, and approached the wake at a slow, mournful pace, circling the perimeter. Many of Stinkbug’s friends were legitimately moved to tears by the gesture. At least, until CSI, having surrounded the wake, attacked. The mourners were unprepared and in shock. After the initial slaughter, the mourners tried to defend themselves, but half of them were in funerary robes, not their armor, and some had even disarmed themselves entirely as a gesture of respect. Meanwhile, CSI had been drilling for this since they heard about it on the server forum. It was a blood bath. The forums raged for weeks, people went into hiding, transferred servers, threatened suicide and revenge, humor articles were written about those crazy MMO people. In short it was a Big Deal, and many people still harbored a grudge against CSI and the other participants in the Bloody Wake raid. On the other hand, gamers being gamers, there were plenty of people who thought it was hilarious. Point being, you didn’t need to try too hard to get Squalid players to help attack CSI.
[64] In truth, there was a lot of discontent among the CSI players because of the methodical, meticulous, conciliatory, and, worst of all, boring strategy adopted by the CSI guild officers. While no one disliked the vast amounts of money this strategy made everyone, at the end of the day Mundis was a game, and a game was supposed to be fun. While Colossus was genuinely pissed off about the forest, he also saw this as an opportunity to start a very fun and dramatic war, which would make the bored players happy, make it cool to be in CSI again, and in turn mean that Colossus had to hear less whining. Many real wars had been started for worse reasons.
[65] Squalid equivalent of Londinimum.
[66] The annual Typhoon Convention, where Typhoon announces that it is not releasing Stella Artis 3 anytime soon.
[67] He wasn’t.
[68] adultfanfiction.eu/sqooshing
[69] Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707). Foremost siege engineer of the late 17th and early 18th century; responsible for the siege of Maastricht (where the Musketeer d’Artagnan got shot in the throat and died) and builder of all the good castles in France. His concept of “second system” underlay Quartermain’s theory of siegecraft as applied to a world where people threw lightning bolts from their hands. Quartermain was vastly overqualified to command the defense of Freeport.
[70] They weren’t.
[71] He’d signed up for Mundis just for the siegecraft angle, which the pre-release hype had played up way more than it had merited, and he stayed in increasingly forlorn hope that he would find someone to have a conversation about demilunes without it devolving into the exact mix of semi-ashamed-I-have-no-idea-who-Vauaban-is, semi-contemptuous-I-can’t-believe-this-guy-knows-who-Vauban-is ignorance he was now getting from Hayes.
[72] It wasn’t.
[73] It seemed like the Squalid had left his voice channel open, which meant that Hayes heard a heavily distorted version of whatever he was saying. Perhaps it was supposed to be intimidating. It sounded like Darth Vader trying to eat baby back ribs without taking his helmet all the way off.
[74] Kantai Kessem; the doctrine of decisive battle adopted by the Japanese in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war. Quartermain knew no one would get it, but he couldn’t help himself.
[75] He had been playing three shows at the Tianjin Olympic Center Stadium to sold out crowds while Hayes had been defending Freeport.
[76] If Kid Twist had known Hayes’s level of historical knowledge, he wouldn’t have tried to draw a parallel between Joan of Arc’s unpleasant fate and their plans for Teabagz. As far as Hayes was concerned, Joan was the cardio bunny from “Bill and Ted.”
[77] Supra, previous note re: level of historical knowledge.
[78] KT doesn’t really mean this; Quartermain is one of the few people KT has considered revealing his identity to, or would like to talk to outside of the context of Mundis. On the flip side, Kid Twist is one of the few people that keeps Quartermain from selling his account and buy his wife a new car with the proceeds (his wife has no idea how much the Omega daggers would sell for, much less the rest of his gear, and Quartermain plans on keeping it that way for as long as he wants to play the game).
[79] His favorite story is about one time while he was doing a stakeout of this meth house. They’d installed cameras in the house. Two meth heads were watching TV. One of them knocks the bunny ears while he’s trying to get some C
heetos or something and whoom! It starts picking up the video feed from the cop’s cameras. The meth heads stare in amazement at the TV, which is showing them staring in amazement at the TV, and after much grunting, just cover the TV with a blanket. The cops are all shitting bricks, figuring the operation is blown, thinking about all the embarrassing paperwork they were going to have to fill out about this snafu. The metheads’ boss comes home and finds them staring at the TV like it’s haunted. They explain what happened, and boss man yanks the blanket off the TV, which moves the bunny ears and takes them off the surveillance channel. Having a low opinion of his minions, he assumes they’re full of shit, slaps them around for being idiots, and proceeds to conspire to distribute a controlled substance.
In another case, the meth dealers watched as someone (the FBI, though they didn’t announce it) drove up to their house, installed a pole, put a camera on that pole, and aimed the camera directly at the drug dealer’s house. They knew it was the cops too—they said as much on their home phone line. (Protip: by the time the cops have developed a low enough opinion of your intelligence that they think they can just show up and install cameras while you watch and you won’t even stop using your home phone line, they’ve been listening to you for at least a year.) They continued using this same home phone to deal drugs after the FBI aimed a camera at their house. Needless to say, the prosecutor did not lose any sleep over that case.
The point of these stories, as far as Tick Tock’s cousin is concerned, is that most criminals are criminals because they’re too stupid and/or lazy to hold down a job at the gas station.
This is a bit like a lion concluding that most antelope are old and lame because most of the ones he eats are old and lame. While not the sort of reasoning that would get you an A in philosophy class, it works well enough in the real world, where the supply of idiot criminals is, as a practical matter, infinite.
[80] $5.95, roughly, before taxes.
[81] Hyperbole. It would have to be an impractically long dump to actually match Whoratio’s earning potential over his entire life. It would be more like a moderate nap, or an episode of Law and Order.
[82] Mad Hatter had a messed up relationship with his father and viewed any activity that might be pleasing to his father, like holding down a job or having a girlfriend, as some kind of capitulation to the father and therefore repellant to Mad Hatter’s integrity and independence (spiritual independence—he was utterly dependent financially). His father hated video games and long-term unemployment.
[83] O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands. Though seriously, Quartermain knew how Mad Hatter would get twenty-five people there. He was just in a pissy mood because the Smithsonian had just announced a payroll freeze. Health insurance premiums weren’t part of that freeze, and the cost of living in Washington, D.C., was not kind to people who get paid like historians.
[84] Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.
[85] We can form a single united body, while the enemy must split up into fractions. Hence there will be a whole pitted against separate parts of a whole, which means that we shall be many to the enemy’s few.
[86] Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest.
[87] Instead of a social register, race, bank balance, or the other standard homo sapiens social signaling mechanisms, in Mundis it was Gear Score that determined your worth; a score that summarized the quality of your gear. The high the number, the better. Anything below 3500 meant you were a scrub—low class, not worth talking to. There were some players that had petitioned Typhoon to allow guards to escort those with insufficient Gear Score out of the territory of the guild that had outgrown such ignoble riffraff. While Typhoon denied that petition, that had barely slowed down the gear snob’s quest to make sure everyone knew where they stood on the social totem pole.
[88] Mad Hatter meant two more problems, not two more minutes. Lockpicking in Mundis was not really related to the actual art of lock picking in any way, shape, or form. It was based on sangaku. In the old days, lovely painted tablets would be placed in Shinto shrines, and they would present fun little geometry problems. Like so:
What is the relationship between the radii of three circles of different size all tangent to the same line and each externally tangent to the other two?
Easy, right?
The sangaku was the original crafting game but proved too difficult for most people (the average Mundis player couldn’t confidently calculate square feet, much less tangents), so the CEO replaced it with what amounted to whack-a-mole. A programmer who thought sangaku was a wonderful educational tool and didn’t fully understand exactly what he was making when he signed up for the Mundis project, stuck it in lock picking instead, where the CEO didn’t even notice it was there.
Since everyone has their own private totally secure bank vault and can’t really have their stuff stolen as long as they drink their Graverobbers, nobody really uses locks anyway. The fact that you basically have to be a mad geometer to pick a good lock is a fact even most players don’t know.
For Mad Hatter, lock picking allowed him to do something Father would approve of (Dad was an engineer) in a way that Father strongly disapproved of. He plunged into that loophole with zest and was, without a doubt, the server’s best lock pick, and was probably the best lock pick in the game. It was a small cadre of amateur mathematicians who would have absolutely killed in AP geometry.
What with the threat of real life death hovering in the background and the fact that lock picking was actually useful for the first time ever, Mad Hatter was seriously feeling the hands of fate massaging his scalp. He felt like a Keanu Reeves.
[89] Given two unequal circles with concurrent diameters AB and CD as shown, tangents from A (resp. D) to O2 (resp. O1) and circle tangents to B (resp. C) and the two tangents from A (resp. D) that the radii of these two circles are equal.
[90] This was in fact their reasoning, and Mad Hatter was right about how wrong it was. But the Squalid leaders were seriously into sqooshing and at this point were just conceptually incapable of understanding that most people would be violently repulsed by sqooshing no matter how well written their erotic vignettes were. As a result, they were seriously overestimating Squalid numbers in the expansion. While the cycle of player burnout had effectively rendered the first year of Mundis prehistorical, it was in fact the Squalids consistently tiny player base that forced them to trade with the other factions for sheer survival. Once all the factions benefited from the Squalid’s raw material bonuses, the situation had stabilized, and the status quo of constant and blatant TOS violation had brought a pax decipiat that had ruled through two and a half generations of hardcore Mundis players. Having forgotten the past and being conceptually incapable of understanding that sqooshing is super gross, the Squalids were set to ruin their future.
[91] Palladium Fraternity fronted an All-Star team for the final Imperius level; the best players from any guild got thrown together. The Shadow People gave the honor to the guild that had contributed the most Conquest Points to the Imperius effort, and the Squalid just picked a name out of a hat. Or, more literally, a random number generator. Methods popular on other servers include the sperm method, where everyone runs to entrance and whoever gets in first gets to raid; the Kumite method, where each guild nominates their fiercest warrior, who then duels the others (some servers prefer single elimination, others have group stages. Some allow substitutions for particularly unfavorable class matchups, others do not); and the democracy method, where the guild that is the best at cheating at online polls wins.
[92] The previous owner of the account didn’t realize he’d sold it. He’d leveled his lil Zerker up and never bothered to put an authenticator (a little device that displayed a security code when you tried to log in to ensur
e that it was actually you) on the account. When he mothballed the account because he was about to go to college, the account got hijacked and ultimately sold to Hayes. Since Hayes was about to get the account (and the innocent Sean Aquilina) banned for life, Sean was going to learn a very harsh lesson about internet security over Christmas break when he tried to play Mundis again.
[93] The PVE/PVP actions outside of Imperius Rex gave the chief guilds the opportunity to clear the individual segments; these raids contained less challenging monsters and less loot. While in theory any raid party could attempt the segment, the social penalty for queue jumping was so harsh that even if you succeeded you were prone to getting your ass shunned, as several ambitious yet socially clueless guild leaders had learned over the years when they tried to buck the system. If you queue jumped and failed, you might as well transfer servers, because your career was done.
[94] He meant that literally; Galaxa the Strumpet had a magic spell that tried to seduce every player, rendering them paralyzed with lust. She simultaneously went into a frenzy and violently attacked anyone who had resisted her charms. It goes without saying that Galaxa had enormous tits. I mean, each canned ham was the size of an Isuzu.