“Yes and no. I found a ring that will give me the ability to instantly teleport to a certain place—my bind point—but only once every 24 hours. The fact that there is no cast time on it makes it a great addition for when I want one of my team to get out in a hurry and save themselves. And that would be our Cleric. If I were still traveling back and forth to the Keep nightly, I may have kept it for myself.
“The second item is another ring that will give me an increased boost of speed for a certain period of time. Great for running away from dire situations or moving quickly where I don’t have my horse. Unfortunately, I rarely travel without my group, and I wouldn’t see me ditching them. However, our Ranger often scouts ahead of us when we are traveling and looks for danger. This would benefit him greatly.”
“Pity. Wouldn’t get so roughed up if you took either of those rings.”
“And that is why you have no friends, Waseem.”
“Touché. Find anything else?”
“Just these,” I said while pointing to two more pieces.
“The necklace?” Waseem asked, pointing to the piece sitting next to the Ring of Swiftness and Homebound Ring.
“For our Warrior. It will help him heal,” I said while examining the piece. The Collar of Regeneration granted an increase of 10 to Constitution and improved the wearer’s Regeneration rate by an additional 5 hit points every tick. I also wanted it for the comedic value. I giggled internally when I thought about the jokes the guys would make about Wayne’s collar and Jenny’s leash.
“And did you find anything for yourself, Alex?”
“Yeah. The last item is the one I’m leaning towards. How effective is Camouflage?”
“The spell?”
“Yeah. There is a ring here that will allow me to cast Camouflage on an unlimited number of people if they are in my group or raid party. The spell lasts for several hours, but it can only be cast once per day. Of course, if you get hit or take damage while wearing the camouflage, it will go away. If that happens, you have to wait the day to do it again.”
“Anything with roads and buildings and it’s worthless. Also, you must be able to blend in a bit with the surroundings. If you are wearing all black and standing on a snowbank, you aren’t going to hide yourself. It’s an aid to stay hidden, but it isn’t an Invisibility spell.”
“So unless you already have a full get-up of clothing for the area, you won’t be able to move freely. What about a horse?”
“Nope. Camouflage and a horse do not go together at all. And don’t worry about looking the part for your environment. I know a guy in the slums that can make you any dye you need for your gear. It will cost you, but you can stock up on all the colors you would need—from tundra, to forest, to desert.”
Knowing Waseem, if he said it was going to be costly, it was going to run us dry. And just like that, our bank would likely be empty.
But the Camouflage spell could help us to get deep into enemy territory as long as we could avoid large settlements and roads while we traveled under the guise of the spell. We would have to walk it, but we could likely cover serious ground in the time we had.
“This work against undead, Waseem?”
“Hell no. The undead don’t care what you wear. They just want to kill the living, and you will still stink like the living.”
I thought it over some more and decided on the ring. Waseem gave me a quizzical look and shrugged his shoulders. “Your call, but there are quite a few items in here much better than that one. This being your first heist, I could show you.”
“Appreciated. And I am shocked to say I actually mean that. This item, though, will be the most help to my group.”
“I blame Dhalean for you being so soft.”
The grizzled assassin being called “soft” would have sounded ludicrous coming from anyone else, but seeing Waseem’s point, I decided to leave that comment unanswered.
I put the ring on my finger and headed toward the window. “Do me a favor and explain to me where I can find this vendor in the slums.”
Waseem gave me the address, and an indicator for the location appeared on my Map. “You need me for anything else up here?”
“All’s good. Thanks again for the assist, and I’ll let you know if I come across any more jobs. We make a good team.”
“Don’t ever let Dhalean hear you say we did anything as a team, or he will open you from navel to neck.” As I went out the window and started to Scale down the wall, I said over my shoulder, “Not saying I couldn’t live with that, but I’d at least get a stern talking-to myself.” Using my Skill, I saw that I wasn’t leaving any marks on the wall as I descended.
This reminded me to check my Skill levels. With my adventures tonight, I had raised Scaling and Disassemble Wards to almost their max.
With nothing more keeping me in the game, I ran to the square and logged off for the night. The next day I would acquire loads of the dye, since I had no idea what lay in the blacked-out parts of the map, and lobby hard for the story-line quest.
I just needed to come up with a way to describe the item now resting on my finger and where I got it from.
AltCon Headquarters
“Mr. Henry, correct?”
“Yes sir, Mr. Jolston, Howard Henry.”
“That was a good idea you had on launching a day for the family and significant others. I was impressed, as was the Old Man. Keep it up.”
Henry smiled and nodded his head in appreciation. “Thank you, sir. I certainly will.”
“What have you got for me now?”
Before Henry answered, he looked around in a conspiratorial way and angled his head toward one of the conference rooms that masked sound from the inside.
Jolston lifted an eyebrow and gave one of his patented looks that screamed “do you really want to be busting my balls right now?”
“It’s important, sir,” Henry said.
“Better be, Henry. You know I don’t suffer fools.”
Once the two had entered the soundproof room, Henry shaded the windows to an opaque color then passed Jolston a file.
The outside was plain, but the file tab listed the name “Napoleon.”
Now Jolston’s attention was piqued. Napoleon was the codename given to Travis Styles, a Special Agent working in the Corporate Concerns section of the FBI. More specifically, Napoleon was on the AltCon team.
It was quite the coup the day Styles walked into AltCon’s headquarters and offered to be a mole within the FBI’s Corporate Concerns section. Since then, members of AltCon’s security team had been grooming Styles toward the AltCon account. Only a handful of people knew Napoleon’s identity, but Jolston was one of them.
Jolston looked from the file and back to Henry saying, “Consider yourself vindicated, Mr. Henry. And know that I will always take time for this.”
“Thank you, sir. I figured that would be the case,” Henry said while opening the file and putting the report on the desk. “After my suggestion for ‘Beta Appreciation Day,’ I was contacted by the Security Office. They offered me a job working some unique cases, given my already high clearance from the beta. Napoleon is one of those cases, and this report just came in.”
“Normally I would ask for the summary, but Napoleon is one of those I like to read through entirely,” Jolston said as he sat. “Please, relax while I go through this.”
Henry waited patiently while Jolston went through the missive. Henry had already read it, so he knew there wasn’t much meat to the report. In fact, it led to a whole lot of questions without any answers.
“Well, Mr. Henry, what do you think?” Jolston said as he placed the report on the desk.
It was obvious Henry had no intention of missing this opportunity, and he had to remind himself to just play it straight and state the facts.
“It’s odd, Mr. Jolston. This is the first time that we’ve seen an independent investigation for AltCon in all the years that Napoleon has been reporting to us. I also found it highly unusual that t
he investigators didn’t state what their intent was, only that they wanted access to any and all information. Finally, and the most alarming, was the directive from the Director herself giving these Special Agents full support to their investigation, again, without saying at all what the investigation was.”
“According to Napoleon.”
“Yes, sir. This is all according to Napoleon and what he learned and reported.”
“Has this been transmitted to the Old Man yet, Henry?”
“No, sir. I brought it to you straight away. It is customary for the Old Man to get a copy, but I wanted to give you first look and allow you to be ready if he wants a brief.”
Jolston thought some more about the report he just read and decided he would speak to the Old Man about the situation. Jolston would be ready with his suggestions, but he would feel better with the guidance and wisdom of the Old Man.
“Excellent job, Henry. Security chose well with you,” Jolston said as he put the report back in the folder and slid the entire thing over to Henry. “Anything else for me while we are here?”
“One other thing, sir. Kind of routine, though. As part of having a higher clearance, as I told you, I got the unique cases like Napoleon. I also was given some oversight to the Bates Motel.”
Jolston was quite familiar with Bates Motel. It was a facility located away from AltCon headquarters, more than an hour’s drive, and it held one of the most important pieces of information in AltCon’s arsenal. There, AltCon hosted the code that allowed the conditioning of beta players to occur.
All of the traffic that came from Resurgence, or was pumped into the game, had to first be filtered through the code. That meant that the servers that housed the code, while simultaneously running the game in the background, had to be located together at some point. However, the more devious minds of the company thought ahead to the possibility that some agency could come and want to enact “regulatory” oversight on AltCon’s business and review their servers and programming. Obviously, the code used to manipulate the minds of humans could not be out in the open.
The solution was the Bates Motel. A next generation fiber line ran from the AltCon headquarters to the Motel where the code and game were intertwined, then pumped back along the same fiber and out to the world. The fiber line itself would have been a huge money maker for AltCon, but it was peanuts compared to the rewards the conditioning would bring.
Any regulatory agency would be shown the servers, sans code, which took up two floors of AltCon’s sub-basement. Even more servers were located on several additional sub-basement floors with a matching number at the Bates Motel.
The idea for the name of the facility was all the Old Man. He loved Hitchcock, and his favorite was always Psycho. The mystery of never knowing what exactly was happening behind the curtain.
“Is there an issue with the facility, Mr. Henry?”
“No, sir, not at all. One of our technicians from Emerging Products had to give her resignation due to an illness in her family. Appears her mom has been bedridden. Her boss, another guy that does some oversight of the Motel, came to me with it.”
“You think she is a problem?”
“No, sir. Her mom lives 10 miles from the Motel. Her boss wants to offer her a job there. He gives her a glowing recommendation. Apparently, she was all tears when she said she had to quit.”
Terrence Jolston reviewed the computer pad with the request for a compassionate reassignment to the Motel for one Emily Renart. She had impressed the hell out of her bosses, and Jolston had great respect for those with the compassion to drop everything for their family. He didn’t hesitate checking approved before handing the pad back to Henry.
Chapter 20
December 6th, 2043
“We could do ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors.’”
“Yeah, we could do that. Or, we could do a roll and decide that one through 50 is the arc quest and 51 through 100 is the next monastery.”
I had walked up on Dan and Jason discussing which quest we would be taking next, with Dan naturally wanting to play “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”
“What are your thoughts, Naugha?”
Wayne had not been focusing on the conversation between our groupmates and seemed at a loss as to what Jason was asking.
“For the next quest. You want to do the desert or Sir Arthur’s?”
“I really don’t care about which quest we do, truthfully. My only request is that we get to fight things. I don’t want to be wandering through the desert for weeks, or hiding in a forest. I’m not the sneaky type.”
“Then you guys are really going to hate my suggestion,” I finally said, announcing my arrival to the group.
“If the next words out of your mouth have anything to do with an ‘experiment,’ I am demoting you from the leader position.”
“First off, Dan, I’m not the leader of the group. Second, my experiments are awesome and helpful and you all know it. Third, you can stop shaking your head ‘no,’ Wayne. Lastly, this isn’t one of my well thought-out, expertly-planned experiments.”
“Oh good. It’s one of your off-the-cuff, throw-us-all-in-the-meat-grinder experiments. Fuckin’ tits!”
“Your lack of faith is disturbing, Wayne,” I said while sharing a laugh with the guys. “Seriously, though, there is no experiment. I was going to make a pitch for the story quest, but it involves some sneaking.”
Over the next 15 minutes, I explained my idea to the guys, of traveling through the unpopulated areas between us and the barony where the Frost Clan had holed up, all while using Camouflage.
I also had to explain how I got the Camouflage ring that we would be using. I had been less than truthful on multiple occasions with the guys when it came to hiding my Rogue skills. This was the first time I had outright lied to them with a whole story behind it. I didn’t like doing it at all. The only upside is I planned to give them all great items before we left for the quest.
As we all got ready to head out for the story arc quest, I planned to stay back and talk to the Wanderer. In order to sell my reason for staying behind, namely buying the supplies we would need and going through the merchants and player-sellers to look for deals, I had decided to keep the items I got with Waseem in reserve. It’s easy enough to say you are going to be carousing through the market place and trying to scoop up any good deals, but if I could provide actual proof in the form of new items, then there wouldn’t be any doubt. I wasn’t overly worried that my teammates believed I was secretly running off to talk to the embodiment of Resurgence’s AI, but I was also slightly paranoid. Giving the items later made for a perfect balance in my mind.
“This was like Allibanger’s side quest when he became a baron?”
“Yeah, similar to that. In this case, I had to use my Rogue Skills, like Conceal/Stealth, to sneak into places and perform tasks. It wasn’t difficult. And honestly, I thought the quest’s reward was kind of dumb at first. Why would you give a Rogue, the master of Invis, an item that only kinda makes them Invisible?”
“Agreed. That does sound lame,” Dan said.
“It wasn’t until I started thinking about our quest into enemy territory and how far we had to travel that I thought it could be effective. I started asking around and got a little more information about Camouflage,” I said, taking out the ring to show the guys. “For starters, it’s useless in an urban environment. Also, you need to blend with wherever you are going to be, so all black in the desert doesn’t work.”
“So how do we get around that?” Jason asked.
“Well, I remembered seeing a merchant that sold dyes for armor. They were way too expensive for the giggles of turning all of my armor the same color, so I hadn’t ever purchased any. However, I learned you can dye your armor to match the terrain you are in. Green for forest and the like. What do you guys think?”
“Personally, I like the idea,” Dan said. “We can be relatively invisible, and I can feel safer ranging out in front of us.”
“Didn’
t I just say I didn’t want to avoid fighting?”
“Yes, Wayne. And I have no doubt there will be loads of fighting to do. I was thinking more about using this when we needed it, to really get around a situation we can’t handle. Dan’s normal method for staying ahead of us should be enough warning for when we need to don the Camo.”
“Well, then, I’m good with it, too.”
“I do want to note, however, that we should make it a point to move a good distance every day. I don’t really know how far, but enough that it doesn’t take us forever to get to our destination. If we haven’t used our charge of camouflage that day, that would be the time to do so.”
“That makes sense, and I don’t want to be stuck in Loust country for very long, either. Dying out there would be a very unpleasant corpse run,” Wayne said.
“That just leaves you, Allister. Thoughts?”
“I’m already outvoted, but I would ask that we at least go out into the forest around the Keep and try the Camo out. We don’t want our first experience to be in hostile territory.”
Jason’s eyes got a bit wide when he saw me smile more than was really necessary at his comment, followed by the look of panic on the faces of Dan and Wayne. “What? What did I do?”
“Are you insane, man? You just told Alex you wanted him to do an experiment!”
That got Jason’s attention, and he started looking quickly between where I was standing and where Dan and Wayne were located. He whipped his head back and forth several times like he was watching one of the fastest tennis matches in history.
I finally lost it and started laughing deep from my belly. “I absolutely love the Pavlovian response you guys get to even the hint of the word ‘experiment.’”
“Shut up, Alex,” Dan said. “You just ring the bell and give me my food.”
*
The Camouflage was a general success. We had our friends come and try to find us in the woods located outside of the city. As long as we stayed in the woods, and wore our green-tinted clothing, none of our teammates could see us.
If we went closer to the main roads, however, we were spotted. More than that, the landscape itself played an intricate role in the success or failure of the Camouflage. When Dan stood in one spot between the tree line and the road, he was visible to anyone standing in the trees and looking out toward the road, but he was totally hidden to anyone that was standing on the road. I loved that about Resurgence; it didn’t simply take a mechanism and say it works in one place but not another. You had to think about how you would use the tools you had at hand.
Restoration: The Rise of Resurgence: Book II Page 44