I beckoned to a few of the goblins who were hauling materials back and forth between the construction yard and my sawmill.
“Can you work on this building with me?” I asked as soon as the three who had answered were in range.
One of the three took a decidedly leadership role and answered on behalf of all of them. “We can…we workers.” He announced. “But only if builder here,” he said a little less enthusiastically.
“Do I have to tell you what to do or do I simply need to be working on the same building?” I asked – thinking that I may be able to capitalise on the game’s mechanics here.
“No we do work if you here. Not tell us,” he explained to my delight – so I made the assumption that by simply carrying on doing what I was doing, plus letting the workers ‘work’ with me, the construction speed would be increased. I was correct of course, and after another two hours – in which time the construction should have increased another percent to seven, with three goblin workers it actually had increased to nine. Not the best increase in speed but it looked as though they worked at about half the speed that I did. It must have been due to my construction skill as I knew the workers didn’t have that particular boon.
Freedom Online was a wonderful world full of surprises and advanced mechanics that I could barely even have dreamed of. Whoever were the programming geniuses behind it were surely to become heroes when the game went public, as they already were in my eyes.
It was the fact that I craved order as much as anything else that led me to the belief that I should do nothing but work on my new wonder before turning my attentions to anything else. I spent two whole days with my goblin workers hammering and hammering at the log pile in the centre of the future lumber mill and when the completion percentage finally reached one hundred, the light above me was blocked out by a high wooden roof that seemed to appear all at once. The inside of the building was set up to obviously take full sized logs in at one end and spit out four equal planks at the other. My steam engine idea had in fact been put to good use, although it wasn’t the beaten up copper onion and dodgy looking pipes that stood in the centre of the building, rather a complex looking system of gears and cams connected to a large furnace, running a huge copper cutting disc protruding from the table that obviously stood to hold the wood for processing.
I exited the building to admire my work. It looked like a long thin train station with a one and a half height flat roof and I couldn’t have been happier.
Upon examination I could see that the sawmill required two workers, currently showing a compliment of zero out of two, so I instructed two of my previous helpers to remain in the mill and run it for the duration. As standard workers I knew that they could unlock the lumberjack skill, but was unsure as to whether working in a sawmill would bestow that trait upon them. Either way as I watched and heard the building fire into motion, it was evident that turning logs into planks in this way was at least ten times faster than the way Isk had been doing it.
Thinking about Isk and his newfound redundancy, I made the decision to let him pull my own weight as a lumberjack. I wouldn’t have even thought about taking this step a few days ago, not wanting for anything to take my precious profession away from me – but whether it was the dilution of the effect due to my ever-growing skills list, or the mouthwatering knowledge of construction that made me do it – inside I knew it was the right choice.
For now, I knew that my stockpile of wood wouldn’t have been in any serious danger of depletion – in fact at the rate the mill was producing planks I would have probably replenished the stock used to construct the building in less than a day. If anything I’d have to think of a way to use up the wood surplus before it started to overrun the place.
Notification
Your Spider Nest (Dark Forest) has gained a new level.
New Level: 2
Central Building: Dungeon Heart
Current Master: Spider Queen (Level 12)
Protectorate: Tandy (Crocodile’s Teeth)
Protectorate Gains:
2% of Xp gained by visitors to dungeon
2% of loot base value lost by visitors in dungeon.
It is possible to amend these percentages within a range that is determined by the level of the dungeon.
‘Really?’ I thought as I checked the slider that attributed experience to my dungeon location. Had I set the slider to give it all of my experience by accident or something? My internal question was answered when I saw that not only was the slider still set to give me just one percent of the dungeon’s experience, my own experience bar had grown somewhat. Not enough to reach the next level but definitely by a noticeable chunk.
That could only mean one thing – the dungeon had been killing things – which in turn meant another one thing. Someone had found my dungeon.
Of course, I knew that it would happen eventually but wasn’t this a little too soon? How had someone managed to find the location of my spider’s nest when without Grish I would never have even found it alone. There were three main possibilities that I could think of, one, that someone had found the dungeon by accident – highly unlikely, two, that the level up was generally due to regular wildlife falling prey to the spiders – plausible, and three, there was a player out there or players who were able to either track locations or sense where they should be going. Knowing games, number three was probably the most likely scenario.
At the relatively low level of the spiders and their leader, the queen, I wondered what kind of party size would be needed to actually destroy the dungeon’s heart, and what levels they should be. Theodore and his group of fucktards probably wouldn’t have even broken a sweat getting through them but by levelling up it sounded to me as though the dungeon had won this time. As good as that sounded, if I knew players – and well, I did – they would start to train and level up in preparation of the challenge that the dungeon possessed, after all, the harder the enemy the better the loot.
It was of course great news that the dungeon was levelling up and I was sure to bump my experience drain on it to two percent – not fortunes but in the long run it would definitely all add up.
It was time to gear up and in a big way if I wanted to finally put my mark on this world and that meant proper equipment. I had been living in my cloth-wrapping wares for far too long. An armoury had now made it to the top of my ‘to build’ list.
In addition to building the armoury so that weapons and armour could be crafted, stabilising the economy of my settlement was also right up there in importance. I needed to be able to summon warriors en-masse should the need suddenly arise.
My best bet was to summon three more feeders and set them to work, knowing that they could quickly replenish the food that it cost to summon them. I also instructed my crafter Puk that he should focus all of his efforts on making tools that would make the daily lives of my workers easier – like for one thing a cart for each of the haulers. Luckily he knew exactly what I meant by this.
With the crafting side of things sorted out I moved my attention back to the armoury. I wanted to make it as close to the barracks as possible so that the warriors and weapons would only be a stone’s throw away from each other so I envisioned it as a module that was attached to the side of the impressive stature of the barracks itself – in for a penny in for a pound right?
It wasn’t too difficult to conjure up the image in my mind of how I wanted the armoury to look when it was complete, as I could simply match the architectural style of the barracks to make it blend in as much as possible. That was of course using the term ‘architectural style’ very loosely, as much as you could call wood and lashings a style.
I decided upon my plan and construction style and picked up my hammer happily. I raised it high above my head at nothing in particular and…
You are attempting to construct an Armoury.
Taking leather from the tanner and metal bars or ingots from the forge, the armourer creates weapons and armour for use in battle. Th
e quality of the finished items is heavily reliant on the quality of the raw materials.
Material Cost:
Wood 4
Stone: 4
Iron Bar: 1
Would you like to start construction of the Armoury? Yes/No
I hammered the ‘yes’ button as per usual and waited for my goblin helpers to spring into action, bringing me the materials I needed.
Chapter Fifteen, Freedoms
R
achel did feel uncomfortable that the company was capitalising on the suffering and struggles of others. No matter how she dressed it up in her mind, no matter how many times she rationalised it by thinking of all of the other companies that achieved the same results in their own way, she simply could not in her own good consciousness, agree with the moral direction and choices of the company. It kept her from sleeping at night, kept her from carrying out her work in the positive way that she’d perfected in the time she’d performed it. Her appetite waned, eating less and less each day as while she was alone she couldn’t help but think about the contents of the memo and what she had been told by her manager – throwing the words around in her mind trying to see how anyone could rationally think that any of this was ok. ‘You don’t just create oppression’ was the only thought she could arrive at each and every time.
She had to know if it was just her that was being crazy, or if she was right. She simply needed to be assured.
This was the thought that finally led her to make the decision that she needed to get more of an input from society at large.
Rachel opened the memo for the ten thousandth time and read it from start to finish. Of course, there was nothing new in the text. No new meanings to be discovered or hidden undertext to be examined, it was what it was – and to her it was a huge steaming pile of crap.
Rachel opened her email account as she sat at her desk. The action wasn’t out of the ordinary but this time she seemed to have trouble preventing her hands from shaking. She opened a new email, addressed it to herself – well her own personal email account - and dragged the memo that she’d received into it as an attachment. She typed in the subject: ‘memo’ and added a few words of nonsense in to the body of the message to make sure that the email would pass the junk filters on both sides of the trail. She wasn’t sure if this was an actual thing, but somewhere she remembered being told that this is how some email filters worked.
Once the email was away, she went to her sent folder and deleted the email before taking a moment to peer around the office conspiratorially. Of course, no-one seemed to make any movements to suggest that they knew what she had just done, but Rachel couldn’t seem to stop her heart from beating out of her chest.
It was only later on that evening when she arrived home that she put her main plan into action – she needed to tell the world what Rapture was doing, how they were manipulating the playership of Freedom Online into becoming a part of a pre-planned social structure.
The only problem that she had was that she knew it wasn’t simply a case of her going straight into forums or chatrooms and spouting off this nonsense, as even though they were facts nobody ever believed internet morons. No, she needed someone with credence, with stature to pass this information on to so that someone may just sit up and take notice.
She needed to find out how to contact a journalist. Not just any journalist but one who people listened to. Eventually after a lot of googling and a hell of a lot of trawling through a particularly large social interaction forum, she found a post entitled “I am a government advisor, AMA” – which she had learned to mean ‘Ask Me Anything’. At first she wondered how to pique his interest but eventually came to the conclusion that she didn’t want to play games that could lead him to believe that she wasn’t credible, so she sent him a private message that simply read ‘I have information about Freedom Online’ and signed it off (after much consideration) as Ephialtes, who she remembered was the Greek who betrayed the Spartans to the Persians during the battle of Thermopylae, inevitably leading to their bloody demise. She felt very clever at making the connection, but couldn’t help feel as though she was constantly going to pass out at the knowledge that she had actually done what she had planned to do, that she was going to absolutely breach the non-disclosure agreement that everyone working for Rapture had had to sign, and that there might have been consequences for her actions that she would not want to even think about. Not just fines, but potentially prison time to boot.
-
Ephialtes,
Thankyou for your message. I must say that I am intrigued, as, well everyone knows that Rapture Entertainment is one of the most secretive companies that the modern world has ever seen. Their staff have all signed iron-clad NDA’s with dire consequences attached to them should they be broken in any way (trust me, I’ve seen one).
That being said, I have come to the conclusion that you are either a prankster, looking to make a name for yourself by using me to publicise some nonsense that you claim to know all about, or that you are an employee of Rapture Entertainment. If you are a prankster, please know that any publicity or fame that you may achieve from your interactions with me will not be worth the consequences.
I hope beyond hope that it is the latter, and that you are employed in some capacity by Rapture Entertainment. If this is the case, then you must have some information that you believe the world needs to know about the company, as if you were looking for fame I assure you – and you must already know - that no monetary reward is breaking your NDA for. I can only assume that you have knowledge of something dire or dark that you simply cannot keep to yourself.
Please take the time to look within yourself before contacting me again. If you still wish to bring anything to light, we can then arrange for something to be done.
Yours Sincerely,
Glen Poitras
Rachel couldn’t help but feel as though Glen had a wealth of experience to draw upon in this area. She could tell that he was warning her off of taking this lightly while at the same time keeping the door open should she wish to continue her course of action. She could also tell that by the way he had written his letter, if it were to ever be read by a third-party – for example in a courtroom, he is expressly telling her not to break her signed NDA, unless something particularly bad was going to happen otherwise. From a legal standpoint, he had protected himself very well and it seemed to hammer home the severity of her situation.
Glen,
I can’t express how much it means to me that you have taken the time to reply to my message. I do not want to go into any detail over electronic communication, but you must know that I am serious in what I say and am very well aware of the consequences. This is something people need to know.
-E.
Her hands shook as she typed and sweat rolled down her forehead until she wiped it away with a sleeve. She wondered how exactly his reply would come in, would he tell her to leave a flash drive in a brown paper bag in a tree? Would he ask to meet under a dark bridge in the middle of the night?
Ephialtes,
If the information that you possess is in an electronic format, which I expect that it is, please follow the following instructions:
Detailed in the message were instructions to set up a cryptocurrency wallet on her computer, then his own wallet address which was a long string of numbers and letters. He told her to send over the equivalent of one penny to his wallet and attach any documents to the transaction.
I assure you that there is no traceability in this method of transmission – neither you or I will ever be implicated in the sending or receiving of any files in this manner.
Glen.
It was all rather anticlimactic. Rachel followed the instructions, pulled the memo from her email account and attached it as a transaction note to the crypto transfer. When it was gone she felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and as if to ensure that nothing bad would happen as a result of her actions, she closed the lid on her laptop and went to
bed.
At work the following week, every day she expected to get a tap on the shoulder by uniformed police, or her boss just to tell her that they know what she had done but nothing ever seemed to happen. What was a little more concerning was the fact that absolutely nowhere had her memo been publicised. She tirelessly read online newspapers, watched the news on TV and even trawled through forum posts wherever she could find anything even remotely related to Rapture Entertainment or Freedom Online. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of a leak, her memo or its contents.
By the end of the next week, she was beginning to wonder if she should start to think about passing the information to someone else to begin the whole process again with a more tangible result, but something different in the office when she arrived at her desk made her re-think her pondering. In her manager’s office at the end of the room, she could see two uniformed policemen and a main in a sharp black suit talking to her boss Tim.
Tried as she may to keep her head down and start her days’ work, she couldn’t help but look up on a number of occasions to somehow try to see, or perhaps lipread their conversation. Her palms were sweaty and her breath short. Her heart pounded each time she lifted her head until the one time that when she did, one of the uniformed policemen was looking out into the room and made eye contact with her.
She slumped back into her chair and stopped breathing. This was all too much for her – what was she doing? What had she done?
The policeman was walking slowly towards her and Rachel could hear nothing other than the sound of his soft footsteps getting closer and closer.
The Copper Rose Page 21
