I slither, sneak, and generally shimmy my monastic ass around the square, avoiding the quainte olde mediaeval gallows and the smoking hole in the ground that used to be the Alchemists' Guild. On the east side of the square is the Wayfarer's Tavern, and some distance to the south-west I can see the battlements and turrets of Castle Storm looming out of the early morning mists in a surge of gothic cheesecake. I go inside, stepping on the blue rectangle and waiting while the world pauses, then head for the bar.
"Right, I'm in the bar," I say aloud, pulling my Project Aurora laptop out of the bag of holding. (Is it my imagination, or does something snap at my fingertips as I pull them out?) "Has the target moved?"
N0 J0Y, B08.
I sigh, unfolding the screen. Laptops aren't exactly native to NWN; this one's made of two slabs of sapphire held together by scrolled mithril hinges. I stare into the glowing depths of its screen (tailored from a pre-existing crystal ball) and load a copy of the pub. Looking in the back room I see a bunch of standard hench-men, -women, and -things waiting to be hired, but none of them are exactly optimal for taking on the twentieth level lawful evil chatelaine of Castle Storm. Hmm, better bump one of 'em, I decide. Let's go for munchkin muscle. "Pinky? I'd like you to drop a quarter of a million experience points on Grondor the Red, then up-level him. Can you do that?" Grondor is the biggest bad-ass half-orc fighter for hire in Bosch. This ought to turn him into a one-man killing machine.
0| «D00D.
I can tell he's really getting into the spirit of this. The barmaid sashays up to me and winks. "Hiya, cute thing. (1) Want to buy a drink? (2) Want to ask questions about the town and its surroundings? (3) Want to talk about anything else?"
I sigh. "Gimme (1)."
"Okay. (1) G'bye, big boy. (2) Anything else?"
"(1). Get me my beer then piss off."
One of these days I'll get around to wiring a real conversational 'bot into the non-player characters, but right now they're still a bit-
There's a huge sound from the back room, sort of a creaking graunching noise. I blink and look round, startled. After a moment I realize it's the sound of a quarter of a million experience points landing on a-
"Pinky, what exactly did you up-level Grondor the Red to?"
LVL 15 C0RTE5AN. LOL!!!
"Oh, great," I mutter. I'll swear that's not a real character class. A fat manila envelope appears on the bar in front of me. It's Grondor's contract, and from the small print it looks like I've hired myself a fifteenth level half-orc rent boy for muscle. Which is annoying because I only get one hench-thug per game. "One of these days your sense of humor is going to get me into really deep trouble, Pinky," I say as Grondor flounces across the rough wooden floor towards me, a vision of ruffles, bows, pink satin, and upcurved tusks. He's clutching a violet club in one gnarly red-nailed hand, and he seems to be annoyed about something.
After a brief and uncomfortable interlude that involves running on the walls and ceiling and leaves half the denizens of the tavern broken and bleeding, I manage to calm Grondor down. "Grondor pithed," he lisps at me. "But Grondor thtill kickth ath. Whoth ath you wanting kicked?"
"The wicked witch of the west. You up for it?"
He blows me a kiss.
LOL!!! ROFL!!! whoops the peanut gallery.
"Okay, let's go."
****
Numerous alarums, excursions, and open-palm five-punches-death attacks later we arrive at Castle Storm. Sitting out in front of the cruel-looking portcullis, topped by the dismembered bodies of the sorceress's enemies and not a few of her friends, I open up the laptop. A miniature thundercloud hovers overhead, raining on the turrets and bouncing lighting bolts off the (currently inanimate) gargoyles.
"Connect me to Lady Storm's boudoir mirror." I say. (I try to make it come out as an inscrutable monkish mutter rather than intoning, but it doesn't work properly.)
"Hello? Who is this?" I see her face peering out of the depths of my screen, like an unholy cross between Cruella deVille and Margaret Thatcher. She's not wearing make-up and half her hair's in curlers- that's odd, I think.
"This is the management," I intone. "We have been notified that contrary to statutory regulations issued by the Council of Guilds of Stormville you are running an unauthorized boarding house, to wit, you are providing accommodation for mendicant journeymen. Normally we'd let you off with a warning and a fifty gold piece fine, but in this particular case-"
I'm readying the amulet of teleportation, but she seems to be able to anticipate events, which is just plain wrong for a non-player character following a script: "accommodate this!" she hisses, and cuts the connection dead. There's a hammering rumbling sound overhead. I glance up, then take to my heels and wrap my head in my arms: she's animated the gargoyles, and they're taking wing, but they're still made of stone. The crashing thunder goes on for quite some time, and the dust makes my eyes sting, but after a while there's nothing but the mournful honking of the one who learned to fly on the way down circling the battlements overhead, and it's my turn.
"Right. Grondor? Open that door!"
Grondor snarls, then flounces forward and whacks the portcullis with his double-headed war axe. The physics model in here is distinctly imaginative, you shouldn't be able to reduce a cast-iron grating into a pile of wooden kindling, but I'm not complaining. Through the portcullis we charge, into the bowels of Castle Storm and, I hope, in time to rescue Pete.
I don't want to bore you with a blow-by-blow description of our blow-by-blow progress through Cruella's minions. Suffice to say that following Grondor is a lot like trailing behind a frothy pink main battle tank. Thuggish guards, evil imps, and the odd adept tend to explode messily very soon after Grondor sees them. Unfortunately Grondor's not very discriminating, so I make sure to go first in order to keep him away from cunningly engineered deadfalls (and Pete, should we find him). Still, it doesn't take us too long to comb the lower levels of the caverns under Castle Storm (aided by the handy dungeon editor in my laptop, which allows me to build a bridge over the Chasm of Despair and tunnel through the rock around the Dragon's Lair, which isn't very sporting but keeps us from being toasted). Which is why, after a couple of hours, I'm beginning to get a sinking feeling that Pete isn't actually here.
"Brains, Pete isn't down here, is he? Or am I missing something?"
H3Y d0NT B3 5AD D00D F1N| «0V V XP!!!
"Fuck off, Pinky, give me some useful input or just fuck off, okay?" I realize I'm shouting when the rock wall next to me begins to crack ominously. The hideous possibility that I've lost Pete is sinking its claws into my brain and it's worse than any Fear spell.
OK KEEP UR HAIR 0N!! 15 THIS A QU3ST?? D0 U N33D 2 C0NFRONT S0RCR3SS 1ST?
I stop dead. "I bloody hope not. Did yo
u notice how she was behaving?"
Brains here. I'm grepping the server logfile and did you know there's an extra user connected over the intranet bridge?
"Whu- " I turn around and accidentally bump into Grondor.
"Grondor say (1) Do you wish to modify our tactics? (2) Do you want Grondor to attack someone? (3) Do you think Grondor is sexy, big boy? (4) Exit?"
"(4)" I intone-if I leave him in a conversational state he's not going anywhere, dammit. "Okay, Brains. Have you tracerouted the intrusion? Bosch isn't supposed to be accessible from outside the local network. What department are they coming in from?"
They're coming in from-a longish pause- somewhere in HR.
"Okay, the plot just thickened. So someone in HR has got in. Any idea who the player is?" I've got a sneaking suspicion but I want to hear it from Brains-
Not IRL, but didn't Cruella act way too flexible to be a bot?
Bollocks. That is what I was thinking. "Okay. Grondor: follow. We're going upstairs to see the wicked witch."
Now, let me tell you about castles. They don't have elevators, or fire escapes, or extinguishers. Real ones don't have exploding whoopee cushions under the carpet and electrified door-handles that blush red when you notice them, either, or an ogre resting on the second-floor mezzanine, but that's beside the point. Let me just observe that by the time I reach the fourth floor I am beginning to breathe heavily and I am getting distinctly pissed off with Her Eldritch Fearsomeness.
At the foot of the wide glittering staircase in the middle of the fourth floor I temporarily misplace Grondor. It might be something to do with the tenth-level mage lurking behind the transom with a magic flame-thrower, or the simultaneous arrival of about a ton of steel spikes falling from concealed ceiling panels, but Grondor is reduced to a greasy pile of goo on the floor. I sigh and do something to the mage that would be extremely painful if he was a real person. "Is she upstairs?" I ask the glowing letters.
SUR3 TH1NG D00D!!!
"Any more traps?"
N0!!??!
"Cool." I step over the grease spot and pause just in front of the staircase. It never pays to be rash. I pick up a stray steel spike and chuck it on the first step and it goes BANG with extreme prejudice. "Not so cool." Rinse, cycle, repeat and four small explosions later I'm standing in front of the doorway facing the top step. No more whoopee cushions, just a twentieth-level sorceress and a minion in chains. Happy joy. "Pinky. Plan B. Get it ready to run, on my word."
I break the door and enter the witch's lair.
Once you've seen one witch's den you've seen 'em all. This one is a bit glitzier than usual, and some of the furniture is non-standard even taking into account the Laundry hak-packs linked into this realm: where did she get the mainframe from? I wonder briefly before going on to consider the extremely ominous Dho-Na geometry curve in the middle of the floor (complete with a frantic-looking Pete chained down in the middle of it) and the extremely irate-looking sorceress.
"Emma MacDougal, I presume?"
She turns my way, spitting blood. "If it wasn't for you meddling hackers I'd have gotten away with it!" Oops, she's raising her magic wand.
"With what?" I ask politely. "Don't you want to explain your fiendish plan, as is customary, before totally obliterating your victims? I mean, that's a Dho-Na curve there, so you're obviously planning a summoning, and this server is inside Ops block-were you planning some sort of low-key downsizing?"
She snorts. "You stupid Ops heads, why do you always assume it's about you?"
"Because- " I shrug. "We're running on a server in Ops. What do you think happens if you open a gateway for an ancient evil to infest our departmental LAN?"
"Don't be naive. All that's going to happen is Pimple-features here is going to pick a good little gibbering infestation then go spread it to mama. Which will open up the promotion ladder again." She stares at me, then her eyes narrow thoughtfully. "How did you figure out it was me?"
"You should have used a smaller mainframe emulator, you know: we're so starved for resources that Bosh runs on a three-year old Dell box, if you weren't slurping up all our CPU resources we probably wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong until it was too late. It had to be someone in HR, and you're the only player on the radar. Mind you, putting poor Peter-Fred in a position of irresistible temptation was a good move. How did you open the tunnel into our side of the network?"
"He took his laptop at night. Have you swept it for spyware today?" Her grin turns triumphant. "I think it's time you joined Pete on the summoning grid sacrifice node."
"Plan B!" I announce brightly, then run up the wall and across the ceiling until I'm above Pete.
P1AN 8:):):)
The room above my head lurches disturbingly as Pinky rearranges the furniture. It's just a 90 degree rotation, and Pete's still in the summoning grid, but now he's in the target node instead of the sacrifice zone. Emma is Incanting: her wand tracks me, its tip glowing green. "Do it, Pinky!" I shout as I pull out my dagger and slice my virtual finger. Blood runs down the blade and drops into the sacrifice node-
And Pete stands up. The chains holding him to the floor rip like damp cardboard: his eyes are glowing even brighter than Emma's wand. His head swivels. "Get her!" I yell, clenching my fist and trying not to wince. With no actual summoning vector spliced into the grid it's wide open, an antenna seeking the nearest manifestation. With my blood to power it, it's active, and the first thing it resonates with has come through and sideloaded into Pete's head. "She's from personnel?"
" Personnel?" Rumbles a voice from Pete's mouth-deeper, more cultured, and infinitely more terrifying. " Ah, I see. Thank you." The being wearing Pete's flesh steps across the grid-which sparks like a high-tension line and begins to smolder. Emma's wand wavers between me and Pete. I stick my injured hand into my bag of holding and stifle a scream when I ram it into the salt. " It's been too long." His face begins to lengthen, his jaw widening and merging at the edges. He sticks his tongue out, and it's greyish-brown and rasp-like teeth are sprouting from it.
Emma screams in rage and discharges her wand at him. A backwash of negative energy makes my teeth clench and my vision grey, but it's not enough to stop the second coming of 'Slug' Johnson. He slithers towards her across the floor, and she gears up another spell, but it's too late. I close my eyes and follow the action by the inarticulate shrieks and the wet sucking, gurgling noises. Finally they die down.
I take a deep breath and open my eyes. Below me the room is vacant but for a clean-picked human skeleton and a floor flecked with brown-I peer closer-slugs. Millions of the buggers. "You'd better let him go," I intone.
" Why should I?" asks the assembly of moluscs.
"Be
cause- " I pause. Why should he? It's a surprisingly sensible question. "If you don't, HR-Personnel-will just send another. Their minions are infinite. But you can defeat them by escaping from their grip forever-if you let me lay you to rest."
" Send me on, then," say the slugs.
"Okay." And I up-end my pocket over the moluscs, burning and writhing beneath a white powderfall until nothing is left but Pete, curled fetally in the middle of the floor. And it's time to get Pete the hell out of this game and back into his own head before his mother or some even worse horror comes looking for him.
What Would Sam Spade Do?
Jo Walton
It was shaping up to be a quiet day when Officer Murtagh and Officer Garcia came knocking on my door. The PI business isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially not in Philly and especially not this week. With sniffers and true-tell and DNA logging, and most especially with the new divorce laws, I'd have been better off in home insurance. I'd have been better off, that is, if it wasn't for the glamour, and the best thing you can say for glamour is that it isn't religion. I was amusing myself that morning by rearranging the puters and phones on top of my desk and calculating how long it would be before I could afford to hire a beautiful assistant to sit in the outer office. I couldn't afford an outer office either; my door opened directly from the street. The answer had come out at fourteen thousand and seven years when the knock came. I couldn't wait that long, so I answered it myself.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 12
