by Kit Falbo
“Thank you.” I wait as he writes me a letter and gives me directions. A new quest notification pops up, and I wave it away before I head off.
Market district in the city is one of those places that is inundated with players and their companions. buying and selling, starting new quests or turning in items to complete them. I decide to equip a new outfit instead of my standard work leathers and crafting gear. No point wearing the same outfit that all the screenshots taken of me have me wearing. I’ve managed to skim by on luck alone, it’s a wonder that no one has found my workspace. Lucky I’m not lacking in gear to choose from, though I don’t go all decked out in items I’ve already enchanted. I decide to wear a sword instead of keeping one in my bag. I’ve gotten enough strength achievement boosts so that even with my basic sorcerer body build I can at least fake the appearance of a fighter.
I make my way towards the market district, moving out of my comfortable little corner where NPC know me as the one who goes to work at the smithy all day. The citizens’ glances are less than friendly here. You get used to unfriendly or disapproving looks when you work chess in the park instead of being in school. It’s a little surprising to see them in the game though.
The looks change more to annoyance or citizens just outright ignoring me as I make my way into the more player-populated area. I can see why, as groups of players sometimes just walk into the NPC as though they are not there, even knocking one over without stopping to apologize. The world may literally be their playground, but you don’t see that stuff at Disneyland.
The market district square is busier than my last visit. Players stand yelling on the corner trying to attract business. “Early Chess piece, good for new players or for your first taste, twenty gold or best offer!” one yells as I pass him by.
I stop by a booth of loose crafting materials and use my skill to tell common from rare and pick up a handful of the latter. The direction Byron has given me is to a small shop just by the fountain, though all the tents make it hard to find. I tap another player on the shoulder. “Do you know where the fountain is?”
The player who styled his gear as a barbarian, maxed his character creation height and added more height with a bright red mohawk asks, “You here for the protest too? I guess it is about time to head over that way.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything and follow as the player motions his companion to come with him. His companion is wearing rags and has gray make-up smeared all over his surly face. He follows just slow enough to show his unhappiness but not enough to stop being nearby.
We wade through the crowd. At the fountain are about a dozen players holding signs that read Care or Respect Citizens. They magically project their voices as they shout, “Talk to them, have a conversation. You will see they are no different than people everywhere. They feel, have jobs and worries.” It is obviously a practiced speech, skirting the edge of what you can acceptably say in Fair Quest without penalties.
I turn to the barbarian who isn’t quite matching the protest crowd. “So, you’re going to join them?”
He scoffs, “What, those hippies. I’m here for the counter-protest.” Now I do sort of have some questions about all this. Suddenly a force bubble clears a wide space near the fountain. Even the protesters are thrown back a few feet for the creation of this new clear area. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see a mage running off with two guards in pursuit.
“DANCE OFF!” someone in the crowd yells, like the “hippy” protesters using magic to project their voice. The barbarian now ushers his companion into the cleared space. A band starts playing, the music not exactly right since it is being reproduced on period and fantasy instruments. I can almost name the tune, and then it clicks as the two dozen or so companions in rags and bad makeup jobs line up then slide as one unit to start the choreography from Thriller. The number continues for five minutes before the song changes up into a pop dance beat I don’t recognize, and from across the way, another group of companions’ come tumbling, in twirling and breakdancing. A few look like they are enjoying it, but most look annoyed.
“How?” I ask the barbarian.
He grins proudly, “Took a lot of work and some practice to stretch the limits of the command function on the companions.”
“Command function,” I mumble. I really hadn’t looked up much about the game other than things related to my plans.
“Remember in the training grounds where we got to practice the limit of the command functions. Order them to jump five times or try to stand on their heads and crab walk. You can’t order them to strip naked or hurt someone they feel is innocent or themselves. They talked about it being an emergency measure, but if you work hard enough on it, you can get them to do things like this.”
“Skipped that day.” I continue to watch the show and the reactions to it. The original protesters look ashamed. Most of the players in the audience are entertained. NPC have a wide range of feelings on their faces. Enraged, disgusted, a few were amused but mostly what I can see is not happy faces. The crowd of players applauds as the music dies down and the performers move away, a few even forcing their companions to applaud as well.
The barbarian’s companion is sweating and a little out of breath when he comes back. The player pats his companion on the back. “Well done Pennyworth.” I arch an eyebrow at that. “I first named him Alfred, but it wasn’t recognizable enough.”
“Don’t they come with names?”
“Sure, but you can order them to respond to anything. BruWaynez can’t have a companion that responds to anything else. I suppose I could have gone all Grayson or Drake, but the butler style lets me keep him out of the fighting as I try to win Kingmaker. You got some nice Chess pieces. You interested in joining the bat guild at all?”
I suppose wearing my own gear would make me look like someone competitive enough to spend money at the auction house. “Not doing the guild stuff right now. Actually, have a quest I am working on at the market today.”
“Well if you are looking for a guild to do more frontline advancing, look up the bat guild. We could really use someone with gear like yours.”
“Will do,” I say forcing a smile.
“Have a GG man. Come Pennyworth, let’s get you back to looking proper.”
I watch as he and the other counter-protesters leave the area giving each other high fives and sometimes drawing questions from other players in the area. I should have expected the game to take this route. There is no strict role-playing rule. Just suggestions and penalties that can be worked around.
With the crowd now clearing I can see the shop Byron suggested for me. It is a skinny building wedged between two larger ones. It’s maybe the width of two doors, so the one it does have takes up half the space. Above the door is a plaque that simply reads, Ores Fine and Refined.
Inside is a small old gnome with white hair and fluffy eyebrows that take up half his face. He sits behind a counter that separates the front half of the shop from the back. “Come to brag about twisting our youth?” He snaps at me. “I heard the music and saw what was going on out there.”
I put my hand up. “I had nothing to do with that. I would like to think I respect my companion and mostly let him do his own thing. I’m just here for business.”
“What makes you think I want to have business with the likes of you?”
I reach into my bag and pull out the letter, “I have a letter of recommendation from smith Byron.” I say, handing it to him.
He starts reading, his eyebrows twitching every few seconds. “This could be a forgery!”
“Having him come down would waste all of our time,” I sigh. “And, really, has anyone else been coming to you with forged letters?”
He makes an animated huffing sound but continues reading. “You don’t look like a smith.”
Once I can see he is finished reading I pull my sword out slowly and hand it to him handle first. “I made this, and the new weapons for the heads of the marshal orde
rs.”
He takes up the weapon, the thing looking giant in his hands, but shows no strain from handling the weight. “So, you’re Chess. I like Allynance’s blade, though I don’t know why you went with ebony for the Rangers. I’ll give you a chance but expect to work for it. I’m going to put you to work, and if you prove acceptable, I’ll let you ask for the help you want.”
Inwardly I groan a little. It would have been too easy to have the letter work out. There is always a quest. Outwardly I smile and nod my head in respect. “Just tell me what you need me to do.” After a while of listening and watching the eyebrows move in unexpected manners, the quest chain updates.
Chapter Twenty- Six -Casey Ellis
Timmy, the security guard at the Immersion Arts offices, checks my badge, a formality since he knows who I am. “You’re looking awful tired Mr. Ellis.”
“You know you can just call me Casey. I’ve just had a hard couple of nights sleep, Timmy.“ The idea of looking into a player’s life has been filling me with dread. It isn’t even a comfort when my wife says that if there is cheating going on, I probably should investigate it. I left out the fact that the player is a minor and other information. I spent the first day back at work avoiding the task. Today I resolved to get started or barring a lack of progress, tell Sun I won’t do it.
Normally, reviewing months of a player’s in-game interactions would take a long time. Just narrowing down a search to the player’s interactions with other players by either touching or talking to them should bring up dozens of daily hits. For Chess, there is almost nothing. He’s pretty much stuck to his isolated corner of the city. Even his quests, which normally push players out towards the front lines, just sent him deeper into the city where there is nothing to kill for experience.
An online search of the forums about him is much of the same. There are fan groups who like the items he makes, even major strategy sites dedicated on how to pick the best ones off the auction house lists to combine with your skills. They all say tough luck if you want to find him. Some theorized that he is really an NPC created by Immersion Arts to push the auction house and that the company is making money from the sales.
I steel myself and open several social media sites and type in the player’s real name: Nate Shoefield. The hits I got were a forty-eight-year-old mother of three in New Jersey who went by Nateline and a seventy-year-old retired carpenter in Texas. A teenager without social media is just odd.
Search engines also don’t have many results. I switch it to search for news, wondering if maybe he has won a chess tournament and been covered in some local paper. I scan through a few pages and nothing, until I see a headline from several years ago. It’s not really news, more of a blog post. Scars of the Missing. The article talks about how having a child go missing affects a family. The name Nate Shoefield is only mentioned once with no other info other than his family moved away from the town where it happened. The reference is from an even older blog post from years ago, not real enough news to show up under a news search and insignificant enough to be lost in a normal search. I select it and begin to read.
Three years ago, just a junior in high school, I joined my father and half the town in search parties looking for the missing boy Nate, who had gone missing during first-grade recess. The teacher recalls him standing looking off into the distance then she turned around to handle some scuffle with some other students. When she looked back, he was gone, but it wasn’t until she did the headcount of the forty kids she was supervising that she found that the one kid was missing.
I skip the part where he writes about wading through the tall grass with his father, where he is more excited about missing school than the actual hunt. Both parents were working, and the grandfather who doted on the boy managed the tip hotline and helped organize the search parties through his phone. Mrs. Johnson, who worked at the community center where Nate and his grandfather often hung out after school playing board games, was quoted as saying they all hoped he would just show up at the desk asking for a checkers or chess board. He was a quiet and sweet boy who loved his grandfather.
Mrs. Johnson is quoted as saying the grandfather left first. He had moved one town over and just started visiting less frequently until he finally stopped showing up. You could see pain in his eyes and the stress of being here. A year later, the Shoefield’s jumped at the chance to take a job in the city. There were more quotes from searchers, but ultimately the piece left more questions than answers. Name and age are about right though.
I search some more, but this hadn’t hit major, or really any, news outlets. Not surprising with hundreds of thousands of kids reported missing each year. Could it be someone just using his identity, I know some games and businesses have had cases of people using personal information from dead or missing people to start new accounts. The lack of social media and other information make it suspicious, I pick up my phone and call Sun’s office.
“Hey, any new info?”
“I don’t see any sign he’s contacting anyone in-game to get information. There’s almost no one on his friends list, and he spends most days away from other players, crafting. Online there is almost no info about the player at all. It’s like outside of the game contract he doesn’t exist. I’m a little concerned someone’s using the identity of a kid who went missing about nine years ago, age and name match.”
There’s a pause as Sun processes this information. “Do you think we should cancel and flag the account as fraud? Maybe at least hard stop the quest line?”
Hard stops involve direct interface with the AI architecture of those involved, which can damage them. It would also mean involving Frank. The easiest way would be just to have Chess’s companion killed. Flagging and suspending as fraud is another matter. The company has a strict policy of getting a police report; most dealt with payment issues. “No. Not yet. You have me going to that conference in his town for a reason. If it’s not a teenage boy using that account, I’ll call you right away. I don’t want us overreacting just because a player is thinking outside the box.
“Okay, but I’ll need a decision before the AI get together to decide and trigger the alternate victory condition.”
I hang up and double down on my real job in an attempt to get this whole strange situation out of my head.
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Chess
The gnome Gromley is testing my patience hard. First thing he does is show me stacks of interesting metals, some I recognize from my collection but many I have never seen before. He immediately tells me he is not going to sell me any of them. “Ya see, most of this stuff’s been sittin here for decades. Sure, we’ve put some feelers out to you Touched saying we’re looking for any interesting ores or metals, but even then, the flow has not been consistent. No flow, ya might as well call all this supply priceless. I won’t sell you this stuff without knowin’ what it’s properly worth and how easy it is to replace.”
I sigh before I accept the quest.
It’s times like this that make me feel like except for being a sorcerer, all my charisma is pretty much just a useless stat. strength would let me lift heavier objects. dexterity would improve my shots if I tried to shoot something. Sure, intelligence and wisdom can’t actually make me smarter or wiser, but at least they affect my mana. Maybe there is something I’m missing and can check out on the forums.
This all means trips to several far-off mines to see if they even have material to mine. Quests to convince the miners to mine it and find out how much they will sell the ore for. Then I will need to convince the traders to move it and find out how much that would cost. Will there be a strong monster guarding a source of Ore? Probably. Since I’m not equipped for that, I’ll either have to hire someone to deal with it or figure out a workaround.
Gromley laughs when I start muttering complaints about it all. “Aren’t quests what all you Touched love to do?” He laughs even harder when I say I need to get back to the forge so I can work for money.
I log out irritate
d about all the work I have to do to get better crafting materials and because of my arm being sore from working the forge. When I get my clothes and other items out of the locker in the corner of the room, I see my phone has five texts, all from Grandpa. Hey Nate, I’m in a bit of a spot. Might be a little later than usual. I feel queasy in my stomach. There is only one reason he would be using my real name. He is having some issue with the law. He’s always been firm about how lying to them would get you into too much trouble. Unless you are being detained or arrested, it was best to be respectful and get out of their way as quickly as possible.
One of the most recent texts tells me to call his lawyer Joe Turino, at the phone number he provided. Then a note that he might need some help with bail. I’m not happy as I leave the center. A little angry even, because he promised me he would play it clean. I dial the number once I’m outside. “Turino legal services. How may we be of help?”
“This is Stewart Gales’ grandson. He told me to contact you about helping with bail.” The rest of the conversation is setting up a meeting. There is an opening in an hour, and it isn’t that far away. It is however, just a small office sandwiched between a bail bondsman and a Payday Loans. Hopefully going for more of the affordability route rather than a major firm.
“You’re just a kid!” the lawyer exclaims upon seeing me. He is an older man in a comfortably worn suit.
“My grandfather, he said he’d been arrested. What happened?”
“An art dealer named Jimmy Lews got pinched for being a bit exaggerated on who actually painted the work. He fingered Stewart as his supplier. Now, your grandfather recorded the conversations he had with Jimmy, and he made no claims to the pieces being done by famous artists, so I’m sure I can get him off this. But because of your grandfather’s criminal record and how he likes to move about, the cops arrested him. Bail was also set rather high at fifteen thousand. My services cost another five. Though I don’t see there being too much of an issue getting him out of this. He said you could cover this. You gotta trust or something?”
