“These your thugs?” I asked.
He nodded, and the NPCs exchanged scripted glances that gave me pause and got my mind working.
“Picked a hell of a place to drop in, noob.”
“Picked a hell of a place to set up shop,” I said, wrinkling my nose and making a show of looking around.
“What’s with the mask?” he asked.
“We’re in a superhero sim,” I said, as if he were daft. He nodded as if to confirm it.
“What’s with the rock?”
That froze my blood a bit. I still hadn’t the slightest clue what the thing did, but I figured it had to be important if the origin had led me to it and allowed me to drop in with it in hand. I also figured I’d only learn its true nature if I got my ass over to that mission marker the rock itself seemed to have called down.
“What—”
“Don’t,” he said, staring at me with those unblinking yellow eyes. “Just don’t.”
I swallowed, thankful for my mask this time. The less the others could see my fear.
“Listen, Dock Croc,” I said, snickering a bit in spite of myself, “I don’t know what this thing is any more than you do.” I reached into my coat with one black-gloved hand and gripped the gem, pulling it out slowly. Croc’s eyes followed me the whole way. He didn’t seem very concerned, which probably told me all I needed to know.
“You’re a tier six, Croc,” I said as I brought the stone out, holding it pulsing in my hand. “Minor threat, according to the AI.”
“Stronger than a drop-in,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.” He seemed fixated on the gem, just like I wanted him to be.
He was right. Threat index wasn’t directly tied to stats like tiers were. Instead, the AI rated players on a sliding scale, from Minor straight through to Titan, based on their in-game actions. Battles with enemy players were weighted most heavily with regards to the threat index, which meant high-threat players had some serious PvP victories stacked up, while low-threat players might simply avoid others. Aside from the two extremes, you could be rated as a Neutral, Moderate, Major or Alpha-threat player.
“I bet,” I said. “But Croc, if you’re so strong, why do you need these muscleheads to do your bidding for you?”
His boney brow twitched, and the lead thug whirled on me as if he’d been slapped. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, back at Scale. “That freak isn’t our boss. We work for the Madam over on sixth and seventh.”
“Madam?” I asked, looking up into the sky as if I could give the devs the ire of my glare through force of will alone. “What time period are we even supposed to be in? I’m guessing she’s an NPC too?”
The NPC frowned again. He had a knack for anger and confusion, but the latter seemed to win out over his programming more often than not.
“Careful, now,” Croc said, taking a heavy step out from the broken cobbled road down onto the beach. A glimmer of something catching the light caught my eye. It seemed to emanate from one of the broken windows in the warehouses behind Scale. The buildings surrounded the sloped cobbled square like dead sentries. I saw another flash, like a spectacle catching the sun, from a window on the opposite side. This was a full NPC nest – a War Town gang operating on a closed loop in this neighborhood, only interacting with players who happened through.
The lead thug seemed infinitely more worried about Croc than he was about me. He took a step back, and I considered slamming the gem off the back of his head and laying him low. But I didn’t want to risk breaking it, because then I’d be dealing with the full ire of his dockside gang and the monster that apparently patrolled these ways in search of weak drop-ins.
The thought that I would be counted among the prey of a player either unskilled enough or with a low enough threat index to make him avoid more populated zones was enough to make my skin crawl, and more than enough to make me seize on whatever semblance of a strategy I’d put together in my sodden boots and dripping mask.
“What’s your power, then?” Croc asked me, craning to look around the thug. The two that had joined him on the beach had turned more fully toward the lizardman player, gauging him as the truer threat.
“Wouldn’t help you to know it any more than it’s helped me so far,” I said. “Say, West Side Stories.” Some of the thugs turned toward me, a few openly glaring from their perches on the dock. “Do you let this beast walk among you so openly? Does your Madam…?”
“Madam Post,” the big, burly thug said without turning.
“What does Post think of Croc here?”
Dock Croc glared at me, but still seemed less worried than perturbed. “Hand it over,” he said. He took two long, thudding steps forward, placing him even with the thug leader. He reached past him, palm up, yellow claws waiting in a slick, scaled hand. “Give it here and continue on with your intro. I’ll let you go. I’d rather not have my docks littered with villains searching out a permer in their midst.”
I didn’t buy it. A tier-one villain might permakill a tier-six villain if they were feeling vindictive and bored, but there was no Infamy XP to be gained by perming, so not even a tier six had a real reason. Then there was the matter of attracting the wrong sort of attention. Show yourself as willing to perm other players, and you might get perm’d yourself. With a tier six like Croc threatening to kill me, I knew I was safe. After all, why sacrifice potential experience by killing one of the few players you happened across that you could defeat? Better to knock me out at 10% HP – the soft death system of Titan – and let the AI reward you accordingly.
“See that, big guy? This here beast thinks you work for him. He thinks these docks are his. Probably walks around like he owns the place. And I’ll bet he never pays Madam Post her tithes.” I slapped the thug on the back. His muscles went rigid under his stained shirt, but he didn’t turn. What he did do was reach over with his opposite hand and grab Croc’s wrist. I blinked as the faint ghost of an icon appeared above the thug’s strawberry-blond grease of a mane. Croc didn’t seem to notice it, but the others in our company did. A few of them shook their heads, gripped their temples, but soon enough, there were ten angry dock workers staring down the lizardman, gray-white ‘I’ symbols rotating above their heads.
“Hmm,” I said, stepping back to admire my apparent handiwork. I hadn’t felt anything, but then, I supposed something like Influence would be on the subtler spectrum of powers.
Even a dud like Croc could take a hint of this magnitude. He stepped back. Not far, but far enough for the thugs to be emboldened. As I slipped farther into the water, stepping backward until the gray liquid rose above my knees, the shimmering icons above their heads went from milky haze to white. In fact, they stopped rotating at all… all but two, which winked out entirely. The thugs beneath these shared a glance and took off at a run, eager to avoid the coming violence.
I’d have to puzzle that one out later. For now, I had eight thugs apparently ticked off enough to forget their beef with me.
Alert: Sebastian, Hobb, Kayde, Sascha, Brooks, Gunther, Mickie and Tara have been Influenced.
Sphere Update: 8/15 Slots Filled.
The green rock in my coat pocket buzzed with excitement.
“The hell did you do to them?” Croc asked. He frowned and leaned back, throwing me a look of disgust.
I shrugged and mostly meant it.
If Croc were smarter, he’d have turned tail and run, just like the two NPCs. Instead, he gritted his yellowed teeth and started forward.
“Won’t give me the damn rock? Fine. I’ll take it off your corpse.”
His eyes flashed yellow, bright yellow, and when the lead thug – the big boy – reached out to place a hand on his scaly chest, Croc hurled him out of the way. His body hit the beach so hard and fast he dug a two-foot deep trench the length of the corridor until he slammed into the stonework beneath a leaning mill at the end.
Encounter Begins
Despot vs. Scale
“Enhanced brawn, I see,” I said, e
dging backward. Another thug screamed in from Croc’s right and smashed a crowbar over his head. The crowbar snapped.
“Enhanced armor… I see.” I stopped when I felt the water’s current getting stronger. I was up to my waist. I looked to the west and saw that green mission marker emblazoned in the sky like a sigil. “Well, boys and girls,” I said, turning back to the beach. “Have at him!”
Up until that moment, I hadn’t known whether they were actually listening to me or simply reacting based on their programming, but this confirmed it was the former. On cue, the remaining seven thugs attacked Croc with abandon, flailing at him with cudgels, crowbars and even errant stones.
They didn’t fare well.
Croc was in a rage. He threw one thug so high she seemed to snap when she landed, and the big boy was only just getting up from the wall his head had cracked, rubbing it stupidly. The ‘I’ icon was no longer flashing above his head.
Alert: Sebastian dazed, Influence broken. Tara has been killed.
Sphere Update: 6/15 Slots Filled.
As I stood mesmerized, watching the scaled beast rampage through the throng of local muscle, I thought that perhaps I’d mildly underestimated the Dock Croc. I wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
I took a deep breath, but before I could orient myself to dive into the swifter currents, I lost my footing and slipped beneath the surface with an unceremonious yelp, my second of the day.
The river took me where it would, and I only hoped I wouldn’t drown before reaching the marker and seeing what the hell that damned rock wanted from me. I tried to leave thoughts of the Croc behind, and the way the Warren gang had gone a long way toward intimidating me.
Couldn’t let thoughts like that weigh me down, keep me from the task at hand. That task being Leviathan, who was waiting patiently for me in Titan City, even if he didn’t know it yet.
First, though, I had to make sure my trenchcoat didn’t kill me.
Five
The Butler
In the real world, I would have drowned three times over. Here, in the lovely virtual depths, it wasn’t the golden glow of angels come down to spirit me away, but rather the ghostly light of stats populating. Water worked on a timer, same as oxygen. At least it helped to keep me alive a lot longer in simulation than I’d last in the real world.
Luckily, I found a handhold, or rather a hold found me, hooking my trenchcoat – I knew I liked the thing after all – and forcing the drag of the rushing river to push me upward. I broke the sloshing surface and managed to throw my arm up onto a soaked cement breaker.
I extricated myself from the jutting piece of iron sticking out of the wall under the water, and pulled myself up onto a slate-gray slab. To the east, I saw the winding river traveling out of War Town, turning less brackish as it went. The ramshackle shingle and brick structures of the docks were farther away than I’d thought, and the darker factories, nighttime clubs and gambling dens of wider War Town were nowhere in sight.
Must be close to the limits out here, I thought, standing and giving myself a once-over. Thankfully, water didn’t soak into everything here the way it did in the real world. Still the toughest piece of VR tech to get right. It was funny, in a dark way, that they could come close to convincing you that you were drowning but still have trouble calculating how quickly a trenchcoat would dry when you were back on land.
Before I could completely clear my head, the AI started to spit stats from my recent fight at me.
Encounter Ended
Scale vs Despot
Result: Draw
Infamy Reward: Low Value
Not much, but it hadn’t been much of a fight, and it most decidedly placed me in the ‘villain’ bracket. I supposed it fit, given my intentions with this flimsy build.
Alert: All minions have Snapped out of Influence. Recommend a stronger Influencing Event for more lasting hold.
Sphere Update: 0/15 Slots Filled.
Damn. I’d been just about to call up my UI to check in with my new minions. My ‘Sphere,’ as it were. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed, but I gave a shrug and returned to the task at hand. Whatever that was.
I was standing on a flat walkway made of huge concrete blocks. Ahead of me, the walkway sloped up toward a field of dried scrub grass enclosed by a chain-link fence. To the left, resting a stone’s throw beneath the blinking mission marker that it had nearly killed me to find, was a bridge akin to a highway overpass. Only, there wasn’t a road atop it. Instead, it looked like a ramp leading from the south side of the river to a concrete tower that resembled a guard post. A smooth concrete slope slid out from under the bridge, slick with spray from the raging torrent below.
“This is my mission?” I asked the buzzing gemstone in my pocket. “A random bridge at the city limits?”
I’d never been this far south and west before. Hell, I’d never even been to the docks in War Town. Never had any reason to. Villains and annoying, Madam Post-led NPCs traveled those roads, which meant they were best left alone by—
Oops. There I was, about to refer to myself as a hero.
“Ah, well,” I sighed, and began to walk toward the bridge. If I didn’t find what I was looking for – if I didn’t find something worth looking for, that is – I’d just cancel out, start again tomorrow, kiss this whole getup goodbye. Though I will admit the kabuki mask was starting to grow on me.
I squinted into the distance, but it all seemed foggy. As I drew nearer to the overpass, the roar of the waterfall reached my ears.
“City dam,” I said, nodding appreciatively. “Clever way to conceal the engine’s draw limits.”
I knew it wasn’t that simple. With the computing power modern VR companies had these days, they could likely make a virtual map to rival that of the real world. But the larger a game world grew, the more stale, stagnant and sterile it became. It wasn’t so much that ambition had been the death of so many MMOVR modules of the last fifteen years, but rather that the devs’ ambitions had been misplaced.
You see, neither players nor viewers wanted breadth from a game world. They didn’t want scope in the literal sense of the word. They wanted an experience, and crafting a big experience didn’t require max draw distances or millions of NPCs. It required depth and engagement. More so, it required heart.
Some part of my mind that wasn’t quite as set on brooding as the rest of me was must have heard the door open, especially since said door was really just the grinding parting of two one-ton slabs of solid concrete. Still, the voice caught me by surprise.
“Right this way, sir.”
That one nearly put me back into the river. I jumped back and set my feet, adopting what movies, games and cumulative pop culture had taught me must be a semi-legit fighting stance.
Just ahead of me, standing before a dark, man-sized gap in the slope where the bottom of the bridge met the concrete ramp of the underpass, was a robot. It was silver and thin, albeit tall, and its arms ended in skeletal hands that had more joints than human fingers. The eyes shone a bright and striking green beneath the misted, cloudy skies, and they had lenses covering them, giving them the vaguely mechanical look of a fly’s viewing orbs.
“Who are you?” I asked, certain based on the creature’s expectant stare that it was an NPC and not a player-controlled shell.
“I’m B572-HU9U—”
“B5,” I said, straightening a bit. The thing was jabbering. It looked to be malfunctioning, though it regarded me with a steadiness the NPCs down at the docks hadn’t. It looked to be considering me. High-level AI, then.
“Okay, B5, what are you? Who are you? And why did you call me ‘Sir’ just now?”
“Three questions get three answers,” B5 said, sounding suspiciously as if he – it – were speaking to a child. “I am a recommissioned battle droid from Artificial Armageddon—”
“Crisis Event Six?” I asked.
“The very same,” the droid said, though my use of the real-world term seemed to throw him off for a
second. Had to keep in character, and all that.
It was the technical name for the event that had resulted in my – in Streak’s – death. But we’ve already been down that road.
“You were recommissioned? By whom?”
The droid, B5, blinked, or flashed his eyes to approximate the same effect.
“By you, sir. And, in a way, by me.”
He looked down at my soaked jacket, his green fly’s eyes shifting too fast to be human. They stared right at the spot where the alien core buzzed against my chest, and recognition dawned.
“Doesn’t look to me like we were fighting on the same side,” I said, frowning.
The droid shrugged in a way that was eerily reminiscent of my own movement just moments earlier.
“No sides left, from what I can see,” it said.
“Fair enough.” I watched it, searching it for signs of… something. “Should I be speaking to you or the core?” I asked, motioning toward the hidden pocket in my coat.
“We are one and the same,” B5 said, again as if speaking to a child. Can’t say I liked that.
“So,” I looked down at my chest, “this droid here is sort of like your mouthpiece? Where’d you find him?”
It was a jarring effect, speaking to the stone but having the droid standing a few feet away provide the answer.
“I pinged this droid when we entered the atmosphere above Titan City. There are many relics left over from the invasion, but few in working order. He will do, for now.”
“Right,” I said, drawing out the word. I stepped to the side, moving beyond the shadow of the overpass, and looked up into the sky. The mission marker was no longer there. I looked back down at B5, whose head tracked me while his tall, thin body remained rooted in place, just in front of the gap. “Are you part of my superpower? My build?”
Mastermind Page 5
