Cc: “Simon Townshend”
Subject: Population numbers?
Hey guys,
I was just goig over the world statistics over lunch and I noticed something wierd. NPC population is 2451991 at the moment, right? But the logs say when we killed entropy it was 2451958. That’s like 33 extra and Im pretty sure that’s not possable. Should probably look into whats causing it, could be an error in the calculation module.
-Dub
. . . Went the first set. I caught the word “Yawnbore,” and the word “deletion.” Was this some kind of Deleter communication? I hardly had time to even begin digesting it before a second set of gibberish muscled its way into my mind’s eye.
IM sign on 09:14AM
doublebill: hey man
sunderwonder: dub, what are you doing
sunderwonder: we are sitting across from each other
sunderwonder: you can just talk to me verbally
doublebill: i wanted to talk about simon
sunderwonder: ah fair enough
doublebill: i maybe compleatly out of line here but just here me out
doublebill: weve been working with him for a coupel of weeks now and theres somethnig about him that needs to be said
sunderwonder: you’re referring to the fact that hes a complete dickhead
doublebill: i wo
doublebill: yes
doublebill: i am
doublebill: and he is
sunderwonder: i know
sunderwonder: it’d be fine if he was crap at his job and a nice guy
sunderwonder: or if he was a dickhead but good at his job
sunderwonder: but he’s the worst case scenario
doublebill: maybe brian would transefr him if we askd
sunderwonder: you know hes already been transferred twice right
sunderwonder: he put ham fighters 3 behind six months
sunderwonder: it was in the newsletter
doublebill: so why hasnt he been fried
sunderwonder: brian thinks there’s still something in there somewhere
doublebill: well intersteller bum pirates was pretty awesome i thought
sunderwonder: so did brian
sunderwonder: word is it was tommy mason who did most of the actual work on that, dickhead took the credit
doublebill: oh
sunderwonder: i think the whole bum aspect was dickhead’s idea tho
XxSuperSimonxX signed in at 9:24AM
XxSuperSimonxX: hay there cool cats
XxSuperSimonxX: you know we’re all sitting in the same office right
XxSuperSimonxX: helloo anyone there?
sunderwonder: hello simon
XxSuperSimonxX: just letting you know im completely on top of the yawnboar situation
XxSuperSimonxX: ive got some npcs onto the job
sunderwonder: which npcs
XxSuperSimonxX: there was this one nearby whod already hired a bunch of adventurers
XxSuperSimonxX: hes on top of it
sunderwonder: when you told him to do this
sunderwonder: you did it as an in-world avatar, right
XxSuperSimonxX: whats that
sunderwonder: were you in the form of a human character or a moderator angel when you spoke to him
XxSuperSimonxX: oh yeah the second one
XxSuperSimonxX: also i upped his stats to the highest levels so he could get the job done quicker
XxSuperSimonxX: thats cool right
XxSuperSimonxX: anyway cant hang around chatting all day ive got to get on top of my progress report for brian
XxSuperSimonxX: chow for now cool cats
XxSuperSimonxX signed out at 9:33AM
sunderwonder: its spelt ‘ciao’
sunderwonder: you stupid dickhead
sunderwonder: i hate you so much
doublebill: why does he keep saying things are on top of things
I was snapped out of my bewildered trance by a sound like a tuning fork being mangled under the hoof of a speeding horse. It was followed by an irritable gibbering, as a few more Deleters broke off from their lines to circle around me. My vision was filled with white light, which would probably have been blinding if I hadn’t already had that covered, and then I was falling again.
This was back to nice, familiar, decent falling, complete with the violent rushing wind that rippled my clothes and looser flaps of skin. A pleasant warmth beating down upon my scalp implied a bright noonday sun. I had been ejected from the Deleter realm, which came as an extremely temporary relief. The freezing wetness of what I guessed was the cloud layer engulfed me for a second, then gravity was free of distractions and rolled up its sleeves for my final, horrible descent.
I landed on an ocean surface that might as well have been made of cobblestones. All four of my limbs immediately shattered. Thankfully the wheelbarrow was lost to the Deleter realm and my pockets had split, so I was no longer weighed down. I felt my limbs splay out upon the water, and I began to drift.
I had no way of knowing how long I was like that, blind and paralyzed, floating face down, exuding so thick an aura of misery that even the sharks steered clear. It could have been days. Weeks. Possibly years, but probably not. What I do know is that I was finally stirred from my daze by the sound of crashing surf. I felt my forehead carving a furrow in the wet sand of a mysterious shore.
Seawater sloshed at my useless legs, fluttering my shredded robe as my face gently settled into the mud. I let a deep sigh of relief bubble through the silt. I was blind, immobile, alone, and face-down in the dirt. Finally, something I could deal with.
PART THREE
ONE
There are people who think that blindness and paralysis would be some kind of deathlike existence. If that was true, it wasn’t deathlike enough for my tastes. But then, I couldn’t really get into it because I had to keep swearing and blowing really hard to shoo off the crabs that came to poke around my nose hole and assess my orifices as living quarters.
As the days went by, my thoughts turned frequently to those bizarre visions of Deleter communication I’d intercepted in the strange realm beneath the sea. I could feel something left behind in my head, the mental equivalent of a seed caught between my teeth. On the occasions when boredom took hold and I began to daydream, a few letters and sprinklings of punctuation marks would break off and become visible in the corner of my mind’s eye.
Lacking any other project to pass the time with I began to experiment with coaxing it forward. It was uphill work; the moment it realized I was looking for it it seemed to dart shyly back behind some dusty childhood memories. I theorized that if I could enter some kind of trance-like state, perhaps its guard would drop for long enough to for me to sneak a good look at it.
When I was a child, my dad used to take us out badgerwatching sometimes; we’d sit in a wooden box staring at a hole in the ground in the hope of catching a glimpse of nature’s most boring animal. All buggering night. But dad’s twisted idea of a good time could finally prove useful.
One night, after successfully dissuading the evening wave of crabs, I took a useless deep breath, and visualized every inch of that badgerwatching hut. The insipid smell of sawdust. The heat radiating from tightly-packed family members bickering over sandwiches. The distant hoot of an equally bored owl. I felt ennui setting in, and with it, something dislodged from
ube.com/watch?v=TANd-_Z_UZA
sunderwonder: that’s disgusting
doublebill: you mean awesome
sunderwonder: stop sending me these stupid videos
doubleb
I was broken from my trance by a shrill wail, slowly rising in volume. The implanted memory ran back to its badger sett. The source of the noise became loud enough to be right next to my ear, and something else pulled me into a sitting position and wrapped itself around my torso.
“Unf,” I said.
The high-pitched screeching noise eventually sep
arated out into actual words. “Oh my god I thought I’d never see you again but I knew you’d be on the same currents as us so I knew you’d get washed up on this shore sooner or later and oh my god you’re all right!” I felt her shift back. “How come you’ve got no eyes?”
“Hello, Meryl.”
“Stay right there.” She propped me up onto my knees and I heard her run off up the beach. She was gone quite a while, long enough for me to lose my balance and faceplant back into the sand. Finally she returned, rolled me onto my back, then did something cold and slimy to my face.
Suddenly, I could see again. Meryl gave my new eyeballs a quick polish with her sleeve. “Can you move?”
“Yes, Meryl, I can move. I’ve just been lying on this beach for the last few weeks because I can’t resist the great taste of wet sand.”
“Aw, it’s so nice to hear that sarcasm of yours again. Let’s take a look at the damage.” She plopped me back down and produced her first aid bag: a combination of sewing equipment, carpentry tools and butcher knives.
“Something . . . happened to me,” I said, as she pried muscles apart to get at my skeleton. “I think . . . I’ve been to the realm where the Deleters come from.”
She paused in her work. “And you didn’t get them to delete you?”
“There wasn’t really a good time to ask, I was only . . . what the hell are you wearing?”
The question was rhetorical—I could see damn well what she was wearing. It was a tight-fitting sleeveless black leather jumpsuit with the zip unfastened to the navel, revealing the remains of her filthy old brown dress underneath. “You noticed!” she said, thrilled. “Slippery John took us adventure shopping. He said this is what all the female rogues wear in Lolede.”
“Did he mention exactly what kind of female rogues he was talking about?”
“You were saying something about a Deleter realm?” she said, carefully splinting my femur with a handy piece of driftwood.
“Yeah. They put something in my head. I don’t know what, exactly, but it’s been telling me stuff. A lot of it doesn’t make any sense, but . . . uh . . .” I blinked a few times. “Where exactly did you get these eyes from?”
“Octopus,” she said, as casually as she could.
“Octopus.”
“Closest thing to the human eye found in nature, octopus eyes. I wouldn’t look at people like you’re looking at me now, though. It’s a bit weird and gross. You were saying?”
“Actually I don’t think you’re the sort of person I want to talk to about this.”
“Fair enough.”
I was wracked by a sequence of electric spasms as Meryl knotted my spinal cord back together, and sensation returned to my limbs. I flexed my arms and legs, stood up, fell over, then stood up again, slower.
We definitely weren’t in Garethy anymore, because it was a nice day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the beach was a warm, inviting bank of fine white sand. As we moved away from the sea, tufts of stringy vegetation began to poke up through the sand like hair on a teenager’s face, and before long we were in a plain of long, windswept grass. It was a far cry from the Garethy grasslands I had known, which for most of the year have to be technically classified as extremely large puddles.
“Follow me,” said Meryl, wading through the waist-high grass. “Not too far to walk. I said I’d meet the others at Cronenburg.”
“What’s Cronenburg?”
“It’s a town. Come on. Shouldn’t be too . . .”
I ducked as a growl thundered across the grass. The worst kind of growl: loud, deep, and filtered through several layers of sharp teeth. And it was coming from very close by.
Meryl scratched her head as the echoes boomed away. “Huh. Bit early in the day for that.” She looked down. “Why are you on all fours?”
I grabbed her by the zip fastener and pulled her down until we were both concealed in the grass. “It’s a gnoll.”
“You’re not afraid of gnolls, are you?” said Meryl goadingly.
Another lung-splitting roar sailed overhead. “Yes,” I replied, unashamed. “Fear is a healthy and natural response to things like gnolls. They used to ambush farmers on the way to market. We had to run and hide up a tree while they were busy biting the heads off all the horses.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s watch!” Before I could stop her, she scuttled off in the direction of the sounds. I hurried after her before I could remind myself not to care.
The gnoll’s roaring continued as I crawled after Meryl, and it was soon joined by the sound of several pairs of armored boots disturbing a gravel path, followed by the agitating squeal of metal against metal and the considerably more agitating squelch of metal against flesh. By the time I caught up with Meryl, the noises were mere feet away. I poked my head out the grass to look.
It was, indeed, a gnoll. It looked the way gnolls do: like a cross between a bear, a dog and a pictorial textbook on dentistry. But this was a much larger and more terrible specimen than the comparatively quaint Garethy gnolls.
The two adventurers fighting it seemed unafraid, despite both sporting a lively collection of oozing teethmarks. They continued to swing their ridiculously large swords around in the perfect unison I recognized as one of the hallmarks of the Syndrome.
The gnoll, rapidly losing blood from several perfectly straight slash wounds, had sensed the turning of the tide and was running in a wide circle to escape its attackers. The swordsmen were at its heels, but every time they got close enough, they stopped dead and attacked using the same Syndrome thrust and slash I’d seen Drylda employ. It was perplexing, but it did lend credence to my theory that adventurers couldn’t walk and think at the same time.
Eventually the weight of numbers and the gnoll’s faster blood loss ended the battle decisively, and the monster collapsed to the ground and breathed its foamy, blood-flecked last.
“Gee gee,” said one of the swordsmen, without emotion.
“Ell eff gee cron,” replied the other.
“Kay kay.”
The two adventurers carelessly tore off all the beast’s foul-smelling armor and equipment—a mixture of randomly-scavenged tools, kitchen utensils and roadkill tied together with string—stuffed it unsorted into a large sack, and sprinted off towards the horizon, leaving the corpse where it lay.
I stepped dizzily out into the open, watching them go. “What the hell were they saying to each other?”
“That’s just Syndrome-speak,” said Meryl, a curious authority in her voice. “All the Syndrome adventurers talk like that to each other. Slippery John says you see a lot of it on the Adventure Trail.”
“ . . .What’s the Adventure Trail?”
“This is. Duh.” The patronizing click of her tongue was like a pair of nutcrackers being clenched around my skull. “It’s the main road around the continent all the adventurers take, looking for quests. We’re going to follow it to Lolede City, as soon as we meet up with Slippery John, Drylda and Thaddeus.”
I flailed my arms in frustration. “Who’s Thaddeus?!”
“You know, the priest. He told us his name while we were clinging to the boat. He’s really excited about going to Lolede, too. Printed off a whole new run of pamphlets and everything. He was just saying this morning what a shame it’d be if we had to go on to the big city without you.”
Meryl was beginning to give me a headache. “I get the impression you’re extrapolating.”
We walked in silence for a few moments, which turned out to be more than Meryl’s excitable brain could handle. “I’ve never been to Lolede City before,” she said, bouncing her pigtails. “You know it’s the biggest city in the world?”
“Yes, I knew that. So does everyone else who did primary school geography. Why are you so excited?”
“Aren’t you?” She was practically skipping.
“I thought you wanted to go back to Borrigarde. I thought you had a post-revolutionary government to worry about.”
She stopped practically skip
ping for an instant, and probably hoped I wouldn’t notice. “Yes, but, there’s still a lot of breathing room with these things. Plenty of time to take a little holiday, expand our horizons a bit. Never mind. What are you going to do when we get there?”
I didn’t let her change the subject. “Meryl, did you honestly spark a revolution in Borrigarde?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did the revolution actually occur, in the real world, with real actual people involved?”
All the parts of her face remained perfectly still, but I could see the façade of good cheer rapidly draining away. Then she mentally injected a little more of whatever it was that kept her going. “Of course! It’s not something I could lie about for long, I mean . . . revolutions are big things. This one certainly was. Swords and ploughshares all over the place.” She was trying not to meet my gaze. “But anyway. Lolede City! Yay!”
“Because if there was a revolution, it probably set a record for speed. I mean, you were only there a day or two.”
“We took them by surprise, didn’t we? The oppressors weren’t expecting insurrection from a bunch of ignorant pig farmers who don’t know what’s good for them.”
She wisely fell into silence, but there was considerably less of a spring in her step. I watched her for a few moments with my head tilted. “Meryl?”
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do when we get to Lolede City?”
She didn’t reply, but I took her poisonous glare as a victory.
TWO
“Slippery John said he’d meet us at the inn,” said Meryl, when we arrived at Cronenburg later that day.
“Any particular inn?” I asked.
“Slippery John just said ‘the inn.’”
I put my hands on my hips and took in the endless racks of shingles that lined what a flamboyant signpost identified as the Street of Inns. “Slippery John is a fatheaded, useless berk.”
“Oh, come on. He’s not useless.”
The day was wearing thin and the sun was making exaggerated yawns and meaningful looks at the horizon. We’d been trudging through the plains for a few hours before
Mogworld Page 15
