by G. D. Penman
[Skaife has suffered 2 environmental damage]
[Skaife has suffered 4 environmental damage]
[Skaife has suffered 3 environmental damage]
[Skaife has suffered 2 environmental damage]
Abruptly, the violence of it abated, and he was left lying in a heap in the middle of the tunnel, groaning. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the experience of being flung around was certainly unpleasant. If he was capable of nausea here in Strata, it was fair to say that the walls would have had some extra decoration. Getting his paws under him, Martin pushed himself to his feet, only to see exactly what he did not want to see.
Beyond the current length of tunnel was nothing. Not more tunnels. Not just darkness. Nothing. He crept cautiously toward the edge where reality seemed to shear off, clinging to the carvings for any sense of stability. He peered down and saw exactly what he’d been expecting. There was the Dungeon of Strata all laid out beneath him, sprawling as far as the eye could see. Easily visible from this far away. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes.” The Master shimmered into existence out there in the void, cloak snapping to some unseen wind. “It seems that the subtle hint I gave to you before was insufficient. So allow me to be entirely clear with you now. You will not proceed any further into my dungeon. You will not attempt to assist others in their progress. You will remain here, in this tunnel fragment, rotting, for as long as you are within this realm. What you do in your life outside is your own business, but let me make myself entirely clear to you now. Your little adventure ends here.”
Martin leaned against the wall. “Don’t you ever get tired of pulling the same stupid tricks out of your sleeves? Swapping around tunnels. Putting me in dead ends. Clearly they don’t work. I’m still here.”
The Master swooped in closer to gloat. The hollow hood of his cloak hung just inches from Martin’s face. “There is no escape from this void. You shall remain here for the rest of time. If you live a hundred years and come back on your deathbed, this rodent form you have chosen will remain trapped in place.”
“And what are you going to tell the other Masters, exactly?” Martin gave him a sneer. “You know, the ones who are trying to actually get people down to the Heart. How are you going to stop them from putting me back in the mix? You think I don’t know why you can’t just delete my account? You’re not a master of anything, you’re a goddamned employee. How long do you think your little vendetta against me is going to last when you’re on the unemployment line for bullying players?”
“You have no idea what is at stake here. You have no clue to the risks involved in allowing people like you into this place. It is madness. It is folly.” There was the beginning of hysteria in the Master’s masked and filtered voice. An edge of the real-life madness creeping through from one world to the other as he squealed away in some cubicle of the Strata Online offices.
The Master took a deep breath to steady himself. “The Masters who cannot see the sense of our position will come round with time. All that is required is that the opportunity to correct themselves is not taken by someone like you descending too swiftly. There is no need for bloodshed. There is no need for conflict between us. They will come to understand that our position here is one of custodianship.”
Martin rolled his eye when it seemed like the Master was finally out of steam. “I can’t help but notice that you didn’t manage to answer the question. What stops one of them putting me back in the game?”
“Even if one of the Crusade’s Masters should come across you out here, I shall leave sufficient notation that there can be no mistaking you for what you truly are. A persistent and unrepentant breaker of the rules.”
Martin gawked at him. “Excuse me?”
“Do you deny that you broke out of the pit through an exploit? That you passed into the next deep by circumventing the usual methods of play, ignoring the Deep Gate, not defeating the creature required to open it and all the other challenges of that deep.”
“You are calling me a cheat? You? Of all people? You dug a giant hole that couldn’t be escaped because you thought I was doing too well, and you’re calling me a cheat? If I could have played the game, I would have beaten your monsters, taken the key and used the Deep Gate, just like every other time. You took that away from me because you were scared. Just let me play the game, you coward!”
The Master reared back, hissing. “You… How dare you speak to me in that manner?”
Martin pushed himself away from the wall, storming toward the Master, chasing the ghost of the developer all the way out of the little segment of tunnel and back into the darkness. “What are you going to do about it?”
For a moment, the Master’s arms were raised, and Martin braced himself for the whole tunnel to flip over and dump him out into the eternal nothingness. Then the Master seemed to get a grip on himself and lowered his arms. “I… Have already done all that I must to remove you from the equation, and any more punitive measures would be counterproductive. For now, you may consider yourself to be placed in a time-out, as must be done to a spoiled toddler. I shall decide your ultimate fate at a later time.”
He began to drift away.
“Don’t you do it,” Martin yelled.
The Master faded further and further from the limits of Martin’s low-light vision.
“Come back here, you son of a bitch!”
By the end, Martin was just screaming into the void. “You come back here and you put me back in my game or I’m going to burn this whole world down to ashes, do you hear me? Do you?”
He took a step back from the edge, closed his eye and drew a steadying breath. This was fine. Everything was fine. He just needed to stop and think. He would turn this to his advantage, like he had every other hurdle that had been thrown in his path. He’d take his burning bridges and turn them into torches to light his way. He just needed to stop and think. He could get out of this. He could get out of anything.
He opened his eye to look out into the void once more. Here and there, parts of Strata moved. Mostly little adjustments, but clear evidence that the Masters were forever at work on it. If just one of them spotted him and came over he could be back in the game and free of interference for the rest of his run. All it would take was one Master with the slightest curiosity about what the others were doing. Or at least that was what Martin thought at first. Then he spotted the other fragments.
At first they were hard to make out because there was no light to see them by, but Martin’s eye soon adjusted to the darkness enough to make out the dull patches that weren’t quite as dark as the void. Here a corner of corridor twisting in a slow orbit around the dungeon, there a little room hanging above the surface of a lower deep, detached and forgotten about.
The dungeon was a work in progress, and he was floating in just another of the scrap parts that had been discarded in the process of construction. A new length of tunnel had been stretched out to replace the spot he had been plucked from, all smooth stone in the midst of the carvings. What would other players make of it? Would they obsess over the strange detail? Would they work out what had happened there? How could they when they didn’t have even a part of the information required to understand the larger picture.
Martin stared out and waited for the stroke of genius to come. He went on waiting. And waiting. Nothing. Nothing was coming. Even he couldn’t solve an impossible problem. He couldn’t jump to the closest deep. It was too far. He couldn’t attract the attention of the other Masters because he’d been flagged as a cheat. Best-case scenario, he’d have his account deleted.
He needed to stop staring the problem right in the face and give himself time to think around it. He turned his eye back to the newly made tunnel, then juxtaposed it with his mental map. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was close. More importantly, he could see where the pit deep had been distorted, and how to get around it.
The gate to the next deep had been shunted to the side, setting the whole angle of the vertical shaft meant to
drop players into the Ravager maze at a jaunty angle, and meaning the smooth plummet that Martin and company had experienced would be more of a slide. The pit itself was exactly as inaccessible as the Master had intended, but Martin was less interested in that, and more interested in the rest of the deep, the living quarters of the Felidavans, and ways to avoid their choke-point ambushes. Every detail was filed away in his brain. Aligned to his map. Adjusted and rotated until he knew every angle of approach. It was the perfect distraction. The perfect little manageable puzzle for him to work through while the back end of his brain tangled with the next.
He didn’t need to jump back into the dungeon. All he needed to do was make progress. There were dozens of fragments out in the void, every one of them closer to the dungeon than the one he was trapped in. All he had to do was jump to them. Step by step, he could get closer, and all the better if he managed to land in one that was being actively worked, as he could be slotted right back into play without anyone noticing him.
The Master had accounted for this possibility, of course. He wasn’t an idiot, despite all appearances to the contrary. The tunnel had been hauled further out than any of the other fragments – not so far as to attract attention, but far enough that any sane person would baulk at trying to make a jump to one of the little stepping stones.
Martin had a love-hate relationship with platform games, dating back to playing emulators of the oldest consoles. The chaotic nature of all the moving parts had left him with beads of sweat on his head every time he played, but that was counterbalanced by the perfect moments when the correct timing and route revealed themselves to him after hours of study. When he could slip into the flow, and all of his previously jerky movements as he tried to twitch away from the traps and tricks of the game melded into one smooth-flowing motion from start to finish.
If this were a platform game, he would have been paralyzed with indecision, trying to calculate the angles and velocities involved so he wouldn’t have to repeat the section. There would be no repetition here. One mistake would cost him everything. It was a foolish gamble to make. His life against some progress in the game? It made no sense. He would be better to cut his losses. Log out. Delete his account. Buy a new one with the money he’d accumulated selling in-game gear and start over.
The loss of progress would sting, but it was better than being trapped in an endless void. He had to be smart. He couldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. He wanted to beat the game – to beat the Master who kept screwing him over – but this was a bad move.
He took a step back from the precipice and drew a deep breath. His brain already spinning through the possibilities. He would have to make an Exorcist again if he intended on using the Rite of Passage exploit to keep them moving through the deeps, and that was a real pity because he had been giving some very serious consideration to the possibilities of playing an Invoker, with all the elemental damage options that brought.
He started crunching the numbers in his head, trying to work out if he could justify the extra time plowing through the additional deeps by the reduced time dealing with monsters. If he truly optimized his damage output across a variety of elemental types then he could double his damage, even if the group as a whole would be taking a minor dip due to the loss of his critical-hit buffs. There would be untold benefits to operating primarily in ranged combat too. A better field of view to direct battles. He also really needed to think things through before he made any wild leaps in his decision making.
Log out. Read information online. Purchase a new NIH and Strata subscription with express delivery. Sleep for eight hours, come back in to create whichever character he decided on and level up as much as possible before the rest of the guild had time to assemble.
Mapping. If he waited here for another hour in this tunnel, mapping out the upper levels of the dungeon then he’d be able to progress much faster. It also provided a small window of opportunity, however small, for one of the other Masters to notice him and intervene. It was a balance between potential plans.
Settling himself down at the end of the tunnel, Martin stared out at Strata in all of its wonder and tried not to let himself feel. He started at the top of the dungeon, the many entrances that he might be spawned into. It was a simple enough thing to work out an optimized route for each, though not so easy to hold all of them in his mind simultaneously. Perhaps he did not have to. Just because this account and Skaife had been rendered useless for making progress, it didn’t mean he couldn’t use this aleph position outside of the dungeon to plan their moves. This could be another advantage. He had to focus on all the benefits of losing this character, not the rage boiling at the back of his throat.
He stared and stared at Strata until he felt that rage choking him and his hands shaking and the unbearable unfairness of it all bore down on him until he could hardly breathe. He dragged himself away from the dungeon and paced to the other end of the corridor. The gravity of his situation was too much. He needed to look away.
A moment to recover his composure was required. He was only human. Despite Julia and Lindsay’s varying attempts to remind him of that when he aimed for perfection, he was painfully aware of his own limitations, even if he bucked against them. He understood that he needed to manage the input of information in such a way that it did not trigger unwanted responses. At the furthest edge of the detached tunnel, he closed his eye and drew in a deep breath, but that just displayed all of his character information. More stimulus he needed to get away from. At least the darkness of the void was there to give him comfort. The total nothingness beyond the edge of creation was darker than closing his eye could ever be.
Deeper than the darkness, he could still feel the distant thrum of the Heart beneath him, but he paid it no mind. Maybe his new account wouldn’t be plagued by these same glitches. Maybe he’d finally have peace to just play his game the way he wanted to. Unmarked. Unscarred. Without Masters interfering or vendettas against him. Anonymous progress. That was all that he wanted. Reputation was a double-edged sword.
For a treacherous moment, he wondered if he should leave the guild behind too. They had a good balance in gameplay, but the social tensions were becoming more than he could tolerate. But that was a step too far, even for him. The guild was his legacy, more than any individual achievements he could make. He just needed to let himself calm.
He saw the shape out there in the dark from the corner of his eye. He jerked around to look right at it, but this far from the dungeon there wasn’t even a hint of ambient light. Looking with his peripheral vision, he was able to trick his low-light vision into working just a little. A blur. A rectangle. A room out there, further even than the place where he hung. Down deep enough that nobody working on the dungeon would even think to look at it.
It might not have even been there. His eye might have been playing tricks on him. Staring out into the total darkness for so long, it was certainly possible. But Martin rejected that possibility. If he started to believe that he was going mad then he could no longer rely on any information he gathered through his senses, and if he could not gather information through his senses then he could not function. He saw the shape in the dark, therefore there was a shape in the dark.
Turning his back on it took an effort of will, as did strolling back along the stunted length of the corridor to take one last look at the Dungeon of Strata, his favorite place in the world, despite everything.
He turned on his heel and sprinted for the other end of the tunnel. Bare feet slapping on stone. Ragged breathing echoing back to him from the walls. All of his efforts turned to this one wild run and leap.
Beyond the tunnel’s edge, Martin flew out into the void. Darker than the places between stars. The primordial darkness that preceded all existence. So dark that it drank all light and all thoughts until there was nothing left but the darkness, and the sensation of falling.
Eleven
Beyond the Void
It felt like it took forever, but logic
ally Martin knew that he achieved terminal velocity after only three deeps had passed him by. His eye kept darting around, seeking out any hint of light, but there were no stars twinkling in this sky. With no senses to rely on, he found his attentions turned to this body of his. The numbness where there should have been pain. The churning of his guts. The sensation of no wind pulling across his fur despite gravity dragging him down. Martin had never wondered what space might feel like, but he wondered if it wasn’t something like this. The vacuum.
Still, he knew that his aim was true when he made another rotation end over end – cartwheeling down into the dark – and saw the rectangular room out beyond everything else growing larger and larger. There was nothing that he could do now to adjust his course, no hope if he strayed in any direction. All he could do was fall. All he needed to do was let momentum carry him to his goal.
Just like the deep he’d skipped into before, he tumbled through the solid-looking roof of the room as if it weren’t there, slamming face down into the hard concrete below with a little whimper, despite the absence of pain.
He sat up to take in the forgotten and abandoned little corner of the game and froze. There were workbenches strewn with electronic parts so complex that they defied even Martin’s extensive knowledge, while whiteboards were covered in formulae and diagrams that seemed to run the breadth of the known sciences. All of them were painfully familiar. All of them were permanently burned into Martin’s memory after the thing that he had seen happen here. The garage door hung a little open behind him, and by crouching down he could see the void was still there, just outside this little suburban garage-turned-workshop.
“Took you long enough to get here, son.” The voice set every strand of fur on Martin’s body standing on end. It couldn’t be.
Klimpt was there, at the back of the room, tinkering away with something on the bench. A dozen NIH devices in varying states of assembly were strewn around him, and his head looked remarkably attached. “I always did do my best thinking here. Boils my blood to think I gave up on it just because those bully boys at the company chased me out. Well, I’m back now. Back for good, I suppose.”
