by Natalie Grey
This isn’t some stupid rom-com.
No, there was no one else, just like there was no alternative to this crappy job. Gracie had been trying to do things her own way, and it straight-up wasn’t working. She picked the phone up and gave a groan as she typed the text her mother would want her to send: “Looking forward to it. See you then.”
Then she switched over to a PDF she’d been reading on her tablet and resolved not to think about the depressing state of her life.
After Jay logged out the night before, Gracie had finally opened a ticket to get her ranking resolved, reasoning that she’d at least be free of annoying guild requests when this was all straightened out. The rising balance on her game account had been pretty to look at, but the money wasn’t hers, and the sooner she got everything fixed, she told herself, the easier it would be for everyone.
They’d been pretty vague about the whole thing, not giving her any indication of how the process would work, but she told herself that the game had just launched and they were probably overwhelmed with tickets.
In the meantime, Kevin had sent her the link to a blog he followed that broke down a lot of existing boss fights in the game, not just from a battle perspective, but in terms of the lore that was showcased.
Gracie pulled out a pad of paper and scribbled some notes as she read. Her writing had always been a massively untidy scrawl that no one else could read, but she could usually make things out—especially when it was just numbers.
The more she read, the more she struggled between admiration for the creators of Metamorphosis Online and annoyance with them. They reminded her of casino owners, in a way.
Oh, it was always possible that they had designed the game mechanics this way for other reasons than she suspected. Possible, but massively unlikely. The game relied more heavily on buffs and debuffs than any Gracie had seen, and some of those varied by proximity or armor or location, while others varied linearly, and still others varied on exponential decay—
In short, the game was complex enough that players would often not be able to understand the exact math behind what was happening.
Just like a casino. Players weren’t fighting against the boss, they were fighting against the game, just like they were with all of the arcane rules that governed ranking. Gracie didn’t envy whoever was trying to figure out her correct ranking right now. They must be deep in the weeds.
All the same, she had to admire the game’s creators. Obscuring game mechanics was a highly successful technique, and the math was technically doable. It wasn’t that it didn’t work out, it was that most people couldn’t make sense of it. There were so many moving pieces that it was difficult for most people to understand why things went wrong when they did.
Gracie, however, wasn’t most people. She read through the fights, her left hand moving across the page as she took notes and her lips moving too, both of them lagging the calculations that were falling into place in her head. More than once, she shook her head at some of the conclusions the blog writer had drawn.
Some of the things they put down to obscure and so-far-undiscovered mechanics were, in fact, ably explained by mechanics they had either not understood or forgotten about entirely.
Most of all, Gracie was confused to realize that other people didn’t seem to develop the same instinctive sense for the rules that she did. She remembered drawing back out of the way of swipes or AOE attacks, judging the distance by instinct—or, rather, the calculations she didn’t bring to the forefront of her mind.
From what she’d seen in other games, players did develop a sense for those things. It seemed, however, that this game was complex enough that people weren’t accounting for all of the mechanics.
She might disagree with the blog’s author about the math of the game, but she fell head-first into the lore descriptions. Metamorphosis Online explored the ruins of a long-forgotten history that included all four races, which could only be understood by figuring out what each race had brought to the table.
The catch, of course, was that each race had developed new lore over the years, transforming the events of the past into legends that twisted and blurred the events. Actual historical stories were no more than cautionary tales now, populated by gods instead of mortal beings.
Gracie caught herself, her lips twitching. There was no actual history here. The game was so immersive that she kept forgetting that.
Her favorite so far was the tale of King Cedory, a Piskie monarch who had managed a successful alliance not only with the Ocru, but with the kobolds and the fae as well. One of his palaces, haunted by an enemy of his, had been a month-end dungeon three months ago, and Gracie was enthralled by the description of each little nod to Cedory’s history and alliances, including artifacts and murals from the other races he had allied with.
When she looked up, a full hour had gone by, and Gracie grabbed her sandwich and took huge bites of it as she shoved her phone back into her bag and put it all back in her locker. She’d use half of this as her lunch break so Matt wouldn’t get in trouble with Vince.
She chewed a piece of gum a few times as she checked her appearance in the mirror over the sink—a necessity, given the strict standards of neatness for all employees—and headed back out to the casino floor. She was trying to mask her disappointment as she went, and not doing an outstanding job of it.
But she plastered a fake smile on her face and walked out onto the floor anyway, even giving Vince a nod without letting her smile slip.
She might hate this job, but she still needed it. She felt her blood pressure ease as she imagined the view from the temple yesterday, and used that to calm herself as she took over for another employee at their table.
She couldn’t help wishing that was her real life, not this.
Chapter Fourteen
Jay had just arrived at his desk when Sam sent a message over the internal system:
Meeting in Chris’s office, Dan and Dhruv want to hear about your research.
Jay’s eyebrows went up. He looked down at his shirt and winced. He was wearing a Dragon Soul Productions t-shirt from one of their holiday events a couple of years ago and a hoodie with the Dragon Soul logo embroidered on it. He probably looked like an ass-kisser.
Nothing he could do about it, though. He took a gulp of his coffee, having forgotten how hot it was, and choked on it before heading down the hall to Chris’s office.
Chris wasn’t there. Dan had taken his chair, and Dhruv prowled restlessly behind the other founder. Tall and lanky, Dhruv had always struck Jay as someone who was too hyperactive to be a legitimate coder. How did he sit still long enough?
Apparently, he managed. The man was legendary.
Dan, meanwhile, had the strained smile of someone who didn’t particularly enjoy being in the spotlight. He had taken over being the front man for the company since Harry had left, and he didn’t seem to like it much. Whatever else Harry was, he had been indisputably good at schmoozing. Dan wasn’t.
Still, he’d learned certain protocols. He stood up and extended his hand. “Jay? Good to meet you. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.”
Jay, obscurely comforted by the other man’s unease, nodded and sat when Dan gestured for him to do so.
There was a pause while Dan looked over his shoulder at Dhruv, and the silence stretched so long that Jay cleared his throat and said, “Uh, so, was the quest coded by Harry?”
Sam made a tiny movement at the edge of Jay’s vision as if trying to get him to stop talking. The Ds, meanwhile, winced in unison. Dhruv gave an annoyed, elaborate shrug, and Dan curved his lips in a strained, humorless smile.
“We don’t know, and we haven’t been able to get an answer from him.”
Harry, Jay remembered, could be incredibly vindictive. During his last few months at Dragon Soul, he hadn’t even had a secretary, because so many of his had quit. Jay could just imagine how he’d responded to questions about the quest.
He ducked his head. “Sorry I asked
.”
“Not a problem.” Dan didn’t look like he meant that, but he also didn’t look like he was holding it against Jay. “Here’s the thing: we’re hoping you can help us with this. You did some good digging. You got a lot farther than we would have been able to, and we want to put you on this full-time. Not only that, we’re hoping you can search the database for anything else that seems like it might be another Easter egg quest.”
“Sure,” Jay agreed cautiously.
“We do have more data for you,” Dhruv said, still prowling. “Whatever he set up, it doesn’t trigger for anyone else now—we tried a few people—and it isn’t solved by a reset.”
Jay, who had been looking at some papers Dan had passed him, looked up. “Reset?”
“We rerolled the character,” Dhruv said with a little shrug. He didn’t think this was worth looking over for.
“You—” Jay looked at Sam.
“Wasn’t my call,” Sam said. There was a warning in his voice, the pity almost wholly lost in it. “Be smart, Jay,” his eyes said.
“Sam was right,” Dan said. “It was a good idea. What can’t be solved by turning it off and on, huh?” The tired joke was still funny to anyone who had ever done tech support. “Not as satisfying as figuring out what the problem was, but quick—and quick is good right now.”
Dhruv gave a snort that might have indicated either derision for Dan or for the sponsors and guilds making a fuss. Or he might have been agreeing; there really was no telling with him.
“We tried just re-rolling the character on the same account,” he said, “and deactivating and recreating her user account. Both things should have worked. Neither did. The quest is still linked to her account. How, we don’t know.”
“Change the character name?” Sam asked.
“We tried that with the character reroll,” Dan said. He shook his head. “It’s a mess, but Jay, I think, can figure it out.” His attempt at being the jovial executive was painfully bad, but Jay didn’t get a slimy vibe from it. Dan really did want his employees to feel valued. He just wasn’t a natural when it came to anything social.
So Jay nodded despite himself, despite the anger pounding in his blood. Sam had promised him—
It wasn’t important. He took the papers and stood, forcing a smile. “I’ll get to work on this.”
Dan nodded. So did Dhruv, though he didn’t look over.
“One more thing,” Dhruv said as Jay left. Jay paused to glance back, and Dhruv gave him an angry look. It wasn’t until he spoke that Jay realized the look wasn’t really directed at him. “I don’t know what that asshole did, but it’s literally impossible to adjust her ranking manually anymore.”
“Maybe the answer is to make her stop wanting to play the game,” Dan said half-jokingly.
“Not a bad idea,” Dhruv said shortly.
“I’ll get to work,” Jay said again before they could go any farther down this line of inquiry.
He left without looking at Sam.
Jay wasn’t there when Gracie logged in. That was a bit unusual, but she supposed he had another big project to work on. She’d have to ask him what he did. If he’d asked so casually, he must have a job he wasn’t ashamed of.
She wondered with bitter amusement what that was like.
Not all of the mechanics in the game were spelled out, so her first order of business had been to figure out exactly how each of her own talents worked. Some were helpfully titled Decreases in force with distance, but just how much did the force decrease?
She intended to find out.
To that end, she spent her time dancing into and out of range of her opponents. She’d chosen the particular type of opponent with care, venturing to a fairly remote corner of the map to find a spell-casting harpy with a particularly long casting phase. This allowed Gracie as much time as she needed to pick her range exactly and then use her abilities.
She was probably also, she thought wryly, developing a place in the lore as a genocidal maniac. Callista Harpy’s Bane. Callista the Scourge. Callista Doombringer.
She could really go for that last one.
“You know, this isn’t personal,” she told one of the harpies. She slashed at it and scooted out of range. “You’re just—hold still—the type of person I need to work on killing right now. Whoa, that sounds bad. I’m a psychopath.”
The harpy shrieked in agreement.
“All right, but this one isn’t my fault,” she said to another harpy. “You aggroed. You started this. I’m just the finisher.” She swung her sword in a shower of particle effects. “A finisher with a real big serrated sword.” She slashed again. “Which is just a sword, not a penis.”
The harpy, being dead, had nothing to say to that.
After about an hour of smashing harpies, she felt she had a good handle on how her skills worked on their own. She needed the rest of the group to do proper tests on how their skills amplified hers, and how different mob types might dampen them.
Contemplatively, she stripped off the suit without logging out—having positioned her character in relative safety on a hilltop—and wandered over to rummage through the kitchen cabinets.
Between her getting sucked into the game, and Alex having his work crisis, neither of them had gone grocery shopping in ages. The cabinets held oddly-flavored crackers neither of them had liked, an almost-gone tub of peanut butter, and stale soda crackers that—Gracie squinted at the label—might predate either of them in this apartment.
Maybe Alex never looked in the cabinets. It was possible.
She threw those away and turned her rummaging to the fridge. One exceedingly wilted head of lettuce was in the crisper drawer, which she threw away with a silent thank you that she’d caught it before it turned to slime, and the rest were condiments, bad milk, and various old takeout containers.
She had polished off the peanut butter and was, against her better judgment, eating the dry crackers when Alex arrived home with groceries.
“I could kiss you,” Gracie said.
“Sure. Anything, as long as I get to lie down.” He punctuated his exhausted words by dropping the bags on the kitchen floor and wandering over to a chair. He waved a hand at the groceries. “I’ll put those away sometime.”
“You got them, I’ll put them away.” She kept out a few items for cooking as she stowed the rest in the fridge and the cupboards. “Hope you like rice and beans. Or is it a cereal-for-dinner night?” She didn’t have to think very hard. “Yeah, it definitely is. You want some?”
“Yes.” Alex had pillowed his face on his arms, and his voice was muffled but emphatic.
“One bowl of cereal, coming right up.” Gracie prepared his and plunked it down next to his head, poking him in the shoulder. “Eat. I need you for experiments in-game.” She went back to preparing her own bowl.
There was the noisy sound of several large, crunching bites, then Alex asked, “Whasperiments?” He swallowed. “What experiments?” he repeated a bit more clearly.
“I have a handle on how all of my skills work,” Gracie said, “but we get a lot of party buffs and mob debuffs, and I need to play around with those.” She leaned against the fridge as she ate. “I should really make a spreadsheet,” she said thoughtfully.
“Oooh.” Alex gave her a fellow mathematician’s smile. “I love it when you talk dirty.”
“There’ll be inter-sheet linkages,” Gracie whispered seductively. “Color-coded cells.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s the stuff. You gonna make some formulas?” He wiggled his brows suggestively.
“Oh, yeah, baby, you know it.” She lost her deadpan expression and started giggling.
Alex grinned and drank the milk from his cereal bowl. “Well, let’s get started on this debauchery. Who says you need to go out drinking to have a good time?”
“We get hot for spreadsheets, it stands to reason that someone must get hot for overpriced cocktails,” Gracie pointed out reasonably. “Hey, my headset’s blinking.”<
br />
Alex craned to look. “I think that’s the chat indicator.”
“Oh, shit! I left myself logged in.” She threw the bowl in the sink and hightailed it into the living room. “Coming coming coming coming. Fuck, there’s a lot of suit to get on. Hello?”
“Hey, there,” Jay said, sounding amused. “You didn’t need to rush, you know. Something about you standing motionless in harpy territory told me that you were AFK. What’re you doing over there?”
“Experiments,” Gracie said succinctly. “If you’ve got time, you should head over. And one sec. Alex?” She pulled her headset away from one ear.
“Yeah?” Alex came around the corner from the two bedrooms, having changed into non-work clothes.
“That cereal is not gonna hold me. Can you order us something? Anything. My wallet’s in the usual place.”
“Right-o.” He disappeared again.
“Back,” Gracie told Jay.
“I have to say,” Jay told her, “between you and Alex and Kevin and Alan, I’m beginning to regret not having a roommate. I thought all roommates were terrible.”
“Not all,” Gracie said, “but I’ve had some annoying ones in my day. In high school—”
“You had a roommate in high school? Hopping an airship, by the way. I’ll be over there in a few minutes.”
“‘Kay.” Gracie prowled up the mountain for no other reason than that she could. It was clearly not meant to be explored, but she had fun seeing if she could find unexpected paths and vistas. “And, to answer your question, my parents tried shipping me off to boarding school when I was sixteen. It didn’t last.”
“Did you get expelled?” Jay sounded impressed.
“Nah, it was just a lot of money, and I wasn’t any nicer to the teachers there. And since they couldn’t go flutter their hands and play the concerned parents at the drop of a hat, they brought me back for my senior year. At least they couldn’t complain about my grades, right?” Gracie had given the speech before, so it was easy to let her mouth say the words while her mind determinedly didn’t think about it.
