Suddenly Rik actually broke out in a sweat as he realized the sheer size of the endeavor he’d walked into. He took a deep breath and slowly turned, taking a look at the parts of the globe that had been behind him. He was going to have to turn this from just a shell into a real world. He was going to have to people it, infuse it with life . . . and then market it. Because, as he turned, he now saw something hanging in the sky as a replacement for the FOR RENT sign. It read
ROYALTIES EARNED TO DATE:
0000000.00
Very slowly he smiled. The heck with creation anxiety, Rik thought. This is going to be an absolute blast. I can’t wait to see that thing tick over for the first time.
And I really can’t wait to show the guys!
“Door, please,” he said to his space. The door back into Rik’s private eye office reappeared. He went through it and headed straight over to the coatrack in the corner by his desk, where the robes of his art were hanging. He snapped his fingers, changing instantly out of virtual street clothes into his normal Omnitopian character kit—boots, breeches, linen shirt and undertunic, the quilted tabard lined with spearproof dragon hide, and finally the belt pouch with the bags of simples and Rik’s special medical tools. For a moment he considered wearing something more formal. But no. This is just another of our usual meetings. I don’t want them to get the idea I’m getting all stuck up on them or something.
Rick reached up to get his cloak, swung it around his shoulders, and paused for a moment. This is so strange, he thought. One day everything’s going on as usual and the next day suddenly it’s a big deal what you wear, what you say. He thought of Raoul. And who you see—
He let out a breath. There was nothing that could be done about that, but it’d be a lie to say that Rik would have been relieved if he’d found that Raoul couldn’t make it tonight. Never mind, Rik thought. Other things to think about today. And he couldn’t help grinning again as he reached around behind the coatrack, got his swordbelt and buckled it on, slinging it in the over- the-back carry position. It’s still so neat. Let’s go—
He went back to the door. “Close the Microcosm, please,” Rik said to the game management system. The doorway went cloudy and vague with the same kind of swirling gray-out that the Ring of Elich used for doorways that were out of commission or waiting for an incoming transit.
“Omnitopia City,” Rick said. “Quarterlight Street, by the Great Ring, please.”
The swirling in the doorway cleared away to show him evening light. Rik glanced around his office, waved the lights off, stepped through the door—
—into absolute chaos. What the f—! Rik thought in shock as the sound came on with his passage through the doorway, and he heard the roar of people’s voices, shouting, screaming, the hubbub of running feet, and saw the stuttery flash of magelight all around in the twilight.
The Plaza of Exploration was a battlefield—literally. It was hard to make out at first who was doing what to whom. There was one large group, not human, who seemed to be operating in concert and chasing most of the other people Rik could see in the plaza, striking at them with clubs of ironwood and carved stone. Trolls? Rik thought, astonished. They look like it, anyway. Liveried—At least it looked like a livery they were wearing, something dark purple. But what the heck’s going on here? You can’t have a battle in Omnitopia City!
Nonetheless, somebody seemed to have forgotten to tell the trolls that. There were maybe five thousand of them in the plaza, scattered all over the place and bashing anybody they could catch. Things weren’t all going their way: here and there flashes of magelight from characters and players of all styles struck them down as Rik watched. The trolls were trapped in this world, too, as Rik could see from here that the Ring of Elich had shut itself away behind a secondary ring of impenetrable blue fire.
Then his head snapped around as, from not too far away, he heard the yell “MEDIIIIIIC!”
Rik’s eyes went wide, but he couldn’t help grinning. Even unprepared as he might have been for this particular scenario, dealing with that kind of shout was what Arnulf Manyfaced lived for. Hurriedly he whipped off his cloak, flipped it inside out so that the squared white cross and crossed swords showed clearly on his back. But what the heck am I going to say to the guys? They’re going to say I’m avoiding them. Well, never mind that now . . .
He plunged into the fray. All around him magical blasts of multicolored fire were shooting in every direction, kicking up paving stones, knocking plaster off walls on the buildings closest to the Ring, blowing out windows. Arnulf plunged through an insane melee of shrieking and cursing and the yells of men and women and beasts of every kind, dragons howling, somebody’s leashed hellhound yelping where somebody else had stepped on it. Arnulf paused only long enough to let a very large crowd of angry Gnarths muscle past him in pursuit of the trolls, their armor in shreds and their independent liveries indistinguishable from one another in the coating of city muck and blood they’d acquired during the beginning of the fight. Then he ran on again, trying to see where the shout had come from.
“Over here!”
He angled to the right, where a big hairy guy, some kind of drow or ogre at first guess, was waving at him past the body of a battle mammoth. Rik shook his head as he dropped to his knees beside the huge bulk: it took a lot of ergs or magic to bring one of these down, as most of them availed themselves of magial engineering as soon as they could afford it, buying themselves an augmentation of that already redoubtable hide.
“What happened?” Rik said, unfastening one of his simples bags and dropping it in front of him.
“Guy caught a blast of trollfire right in the chops,” said the ogre. He—no, she, sometimes it was hard to tell with ogres—was a huge red-haired type, horny- hided and with the typical big blunt face. “Then a troll hit him from behind when he went down—”
“Friend of yours?”
The ogre shook her head. “No, just saw him go down. Thought he blundered in here by accident, maybe—”
“I bet a lot of people’ve been doing that,” Rik said. “Did it myself. How long ago?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“Great. Thanks.”
The battle mammoth stirred a little, a feeble jerk of the legs. “What happen?” it said. “Can’t move—”
The translation sounded a little stiff. “Game management,” Rik said as he got up and hurriedly looked the beast over, “display original language.”
The translation obligingly displayed in a split frame above the stricken character’s head. It was Chinese of some kind, Rik thought. “What is that?”
“Mandarin,” said the game management voice.
“Okay,” Rik said. “Lie still, it will be all right.” He kept his wording a little more formal for the moment. The game translation matrices famously had trouble with slang and casual usages when the servers were overloaded, which Rik could just bet they were at the moment. “I am a medic, I will help.”
He circled around and did the quickest assessment he could when the client was so very large. Head and chest were okay, but there was definitely considerable damage to the rear: a big crushing injury of the back right leg, a lot of blood loss from a torn vein. Arnulf got busy, as there was no time to waste when there was damage of this kind—not if he was going to keep this player from losing his character entirely. There was no telling how much of the guy’s monthly—or yearly—income was wrapped up in this persona. Game display would show that data later, if Arnulf had the time or inclination to look.
Arnulf held his hands out over the massive body and invoked the medspell routine that would give him a more detailed diagnosis. He heard in his ear, without really noticing it, the soft stylized ka-ching! cash-register chime that told him the system had docked his game gold total for the performance of this spell. The spell graphic proper ran with its usual speed and showed Rik the details of the tear in the vein—fortunately a fairly clean one—and the smashed muscle. Aah, whatever hit him got the tendon too. Damn it. Pr
obably one of those nasty big stone clubs with spikes sticking out all over it. Never mind, let’s get him patched up—
Rik did some quick sums in his head as to how much spell energy it was going to cost him to reknit the tendon and regrow the muscle. There’s so much of it, that’s the problem. But it was his problem, not the client’s. Other medical mages might go around requiring payment in advance, but that wasn’t how the MediMages Without Frontiers guilds operated. I get to forgo those fancy new robes until this guy pays me off, Rik thought. Whatever.
He okayed the payment for the spell, heard that soft ka-ching! again, and held out his hands. Under them the magefire bloomed. The muscle began reinflating itself: the tendon rewove its core, then its sheath. Arnulf glanced up only briefly during this, noting that there suddenly seemed to be lot of movement around them, big dark forms blowing past across the plaza.
“Don’t worry,” the ogre said. “Looks like the citizenry and the tourists’re getting rid of the trolls. I’ll make sure you don’t get trampled.”
Arnulf saw one massive black form rushing toward them gather itself and leap right over him, the ogre, and the battle mammoth. It was one of those giant flesh-eating doomsteeds from Palomino, followed by several others of its kind. That’s gonna be fun, Arnulf thought, as the huge angry creature and its fellows went plunging past and headed for a group of trolls running out of the plaza on the south side. Be interesting to see one of them eat a troll. Probably crunch the thing right up like hard candy. Maybe later. He kept his eye on the mammoth’s muscle: it would be a shame to spend all this energy on a crooked heal.
But it was coming along nicely. After a few more minutes of making sure that both ends of the muscle knit out equally, it was just a matter of sealing the torn underskin fascia membrane and regrowing the red-brown fur over the healed injury. “Would you try to move that leg for me now, please?” Arnulf said.
The mammoth moved the leg jerkily: moved it again. “Feels better,” it said.
Arnulf stood up, dusted himself off. “Okay,” he said. “I mean, all right. Try to stand up now.”
Shakily the mammoth stood. It swayed a little, but didn’t fall again. “You feel all right otherwise?” Arnulf said. “How is your head?”
“Head’s all right,” said the mammoth. It turned its head, felt the leg with its trunk.
“Good,” Arnulf said. “Is everything else all right?”
The mammoth turned back toward Arnulf, patted his face with its trunk: a clumsy but friendly gesture. “All, all right. Thanks, thanks many.”
“Great.” Arnulf went over to it, patted the mammoth’s shoulder. “My card.”
Instantly the mammoth was painlessly branded there with the mark of Arnulf’s guild, his own set of ID sigils, and the Omnitopian date and time. When the player handling this character was ready, or could afford it, he’d credit Arnulf’s game account with the basic healing payment, or more if the player could afford it—healing was always assumed to run on a sliding scale, so that those who could afford it paid a little more and subsidized those who might have more trouble paying. Once the healing was paid for, the brand would vanish; in the meantime it served as a free ad for Arnulf’s services and for his guild.
The mammoth felt the brand curiously with its trunk as the ogre got up to have a look at it as well. “We’re all done,” Arnulf said. “Go on, better get out of here till they clean this up. And keep your head down, guy.”
The mammoth nodded and lumbered off toward the Ring. “Hey, thanks for helping him,” said the ogre, heading that way too.
“It’s what we do,” Arnulf said. “Thanks for making sure he got help. That was the important part.”
Arnulf packed himself up, dusted himself off, and looked around to see what seemed to be the safest direction in which to make his escape.
He found that four or five other practitioners had hit the field of battle while he was busy with the battle mammoth. There wasn’t really anything much for him to do: “complete” casualties, character deaths, had already vanished from the field of battle. Others, not so badly hurt or just shaken up, were getting to their feet, checking themselves out. There was no more fighting going on in the plaza. The trolls had all been chased out of it, and even as he watched the doomsteeds and various others pursuing them, Arnulf could see some of the trolls vanishing into thin air, as if simply plucked out of play. “Looks like the cavalry’s come over the hill,” he said under his breath.
He watched the plaza for a few more minutes. The Ring was still closed off. Got a few minutes to kill here, I guess, Arnulf thought, and glanced around. Off to one side was a group of Elves and humans and other creatures, leaning against one of the buildings that surrounded the plaza and surveying the former battlefield.
Arnulf made his way over to them. “Everybody okay over here?”
There was a general chorus of agreement. “Thought we’d stay out of the way while the management tidies things up,” said one of the smaller creatures sitting by the wall, a black witch’s cat with a British accent. “No point in getting stepped on.”
“No,” Arnulf said, leaning against the wall as well, watching idly as the plaza started to clear out. “But I got here in the middle of the brouhaha. When did it start?”
“About half an hour ago,” said the cat. “Big charge of trolls came out of the Ring from about twelve different portals over a few seconds. Trashed anyone who got in their way.” Its tail lashed. “There were a lot of people waiting for access—it turned into a real mob scene. Then the word got out on the City nets and half the town came pouring in here, all indignant and looking for a fight.” The cat smiled. “Transient population’s bigger than usual, what with the rollout coming. Whoever those trolls were representing, they didn’t have it as easy as they thought they were going to.”
Rik shook his head. “Well, ‘indignant’ I can understand,” he said. “I thought there couldn’t be wars in Omnitopia City anymore. The City outlawed that kind of thing years back!”
The next player over along the wall from the cat, an Elf leaning wearily on a bow with a broken string, got a bemused look. “Well, yeah, it did,” he said. “But have you been hiding under a rock or something? The mayor got killed last night.”
“What?” It came as a shock. The charismatic Dwarven politician Margon k’Pellish had held the Omnitopia City mayoralty, it seemed to Arnulf, for the guts of forever. Everybody had gotten used to him as a likable, laissez-faire kind of character with brains enough to run the city and also to stay out of its way. Then again, that long a time spent in office was probably reason enough for whoever was playing old M.K.P. to have gotten a little careless.
“Yup,” the Elf said, leaning his bow against the nearby wall and patting himself down for a moment, then coming up with a scented smokestick. He tapped it against the wall; the tapped end lit. The Elf took a long drag and blew out purple smoke that wove itself into rings, linked through one another and went floating off into the evening sky. “Manticore got him,” the Elf said. “Nasty. Someone smuggled it into his office.”
Arnulf blinked. A manticore stood six feet high at its leonine body’s shoulder, and might be four or five yards’ length between the nose on the beast’s ugly man-face and the scorpion-stinger tip of the long tail. And then there were those big sharp-edged wings to consider, spanning some eighteen or twenty feet even on a small animal. “Must have been some determined smuggler,” Rik said.
The Elf nodded, took another drag on the smokestick, then stubbed it out on the wall and dropped the butt. A mallrat scampered down out of the side street, caught the butt before it even hit the ground, and ran off down the street with it. The cat eyed it and closed its eyes, unconcerned. “Thing got around the guy’s security spells, apparently,” the Elf said. “After that, in came the trolls.”
Arnulf frowned and shook his head as he looked across at the Ring. “Anything on the feeds about who might have been running them?”
“Nothing definitiv
e,” said the Elf. “The usual rumors. I saw some people suggesting this was something to do with one of the ‘wealth redistribution’ guilds.” He gave Arnulf an annoyed look at the name. Arnulf rolled his eyes, agreeing. The various thieves’ guilds were always trying to position themselves upmarket—at least organizationally—with poor results: a thief was still a thief, no matter how they tried to portray themselves as downtrodden blue-collar types who only needed collective bargaining powers to make the world work perfectly. “A lot of smash-and-grab action started going on just after the trolls arrived, apparently.”
“Great,” Arnulf muttered.
“Well, it won’t last,” the Elf said. “But in the meantime, no more mayor, no more government. No more rules. At least until we get a new mayor.” He smiled a grim, amused smile. “Election by combat, as usual.”
“Hoo boy,” Arnulf said, making a mental note to stay out of the City for the next few days. “Wonder what upper management’s going to make of this development.”
“What, you mean in terms of the rollout?” The Elf shook his head. “No idea. I suppose Dev Himself could always drop out of the sky and calm things down. Appoint a mayor or something. But that’s not usually his style, as I understand it. He seems to like to let things run.”
“Yeah, but now?” There had been so much publicity about the rollout that Arnulf found it hard to believe he’d let the centerpiece of the whole Omnitopia project turn into the epicenter of a civil war at such a sensitive time.
“No idea, man,” the Elf said. He picked up his bow, started to sling it over his shoulder, and then remembered that it wouldn’t stay slung. “I’m gonna be watching the feeds, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah,” Arnulf said. “Me too.”
As they watched, the blue fire surrounding the Ring vanished. “There we go,” said the Elf. “business as usual.”
“You think?” Arnulf said. “After something like this?”
“Gonna have to be,” said the Elf, “if upper management wants their rollout to go as planned.” And he bowed to Arnulf, the exaggerated courtesy of one denizen of the Hundred and Twenty-one Worlds to another. “Play fairly, Brother,” he said. “Play well.”
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