Roark frowned and rubbed his temples. They didn’t have time to waste. From what he’d seen, Lowen was preparing to mobilize any day now. The bastard could have the entire Vault of the Radiant Shield knocking down their door tomorrow if he wanted. He needed allies and he needed them yesterday.
“All right,” he said finally. “It’s time we take another trip to the market. Maybe with all of us asking, one might have better luck getting information on where Variok’s gone. Failing that, we can start looking around for a backup. And while we’re there, we can start gathering the rest of what we need.” He stood and looked from Kaz to Zyra. “You’ll want your disguises.”
One way or another, they were going to found an Infernal settlement. The very first mob marketplace in Hearthworld.
Never Gonna Give You Up
SCOTT BAYANI TOSSED the cartoony fist mace onto the altar.
“Oh, an item for me, a totally human sorcerer, to enchant!” Danno the Sorceror said, hopping up and down on his penguin feet and slapping his flippers together. His fake beard slipped away from his beak, and he hurried to adjust it. “What great fun! Nwaaak! Ahem, I mean, yay, because that is how totally normal humans, like me, talk.”
Scott rolled his eyes as the penguin waved his flippers over the mace and began to sway. Kismet was such a joke compared to Hearthworld. Like, if you had ten minutes with nothing to do, it was almost a decent waste of time. Or if you were seven years old.
“The ritual is complete, thanks to me, a totally normal human sorcerer,” the penguin said.
The mace reappeared in Scott’s hand. He inspected the new bonuses.
And of course half of them were red.
The penguin shifted from flat orange foot to flat orange foot. “Even totally normal human sorcerers accidentally curse things sometimes.”
“Get bent, you fucking lame-tard,” Scott said, too bored to even really be mad. The truth was he just didn’t care about this stupid game.
He turned on his heel and stalked out of the cemetery, throwing the mace over his shoulder. The lag on the movements was un-fucking-believable. You’d think a low-res mess like this would at least be able to run halfway suitable graphics on a system with as much memory as his InfiniTab, but apparently no such luck.
“Log out.”
The corny flute music and caricature of a medieval village disappeared, replaced by a menu showing his account, Gamerscore, list of achievements, and all the games he had.
He’d already tried to get back into Aftermath: New Bangkok, StealSTUFF9, GunSlung, and even MotoXJRPG: Final Yakuza Death Race. Epic fails, each and every one. Double for Kismet. Their quests were baby play, the graphics sucked anus, the storylines sucked more anus, and most of the servers had been abandoned for Hearthworld anyway. The few people who hadn’t left were losers Scott hated.
“There’s nothing to play.” In spite of the automatic speech clarification and amplification of his CandorSight UIVR headset, his voice sounded flat. Like someone who had died of boredom. “There’s nothing to do.”
He had eight hours before he had to be at work. Eight freaking hours! What was he supposed to do, spend eight hours looking at porn?
The Hearthworld thumbnail just sat there, staring at him. Taunting him. Mocking him. You know this is what you want.
“Ugh, fine!” Scott selected it, disgust rolling through him in a wave.
Driving war drums erupted as the familiar Hearthworld loading screen appeared. His pulse sped up in anticipation, the mild self-loathing quickly giving way to the sharp edge of anticipation and white-hot adrenaline. Malaika and Infernali fought each other in the sky over the Hearth, while the mortal races duked it out below. The smell of volcanic smoke and the clash of battle filled Scott’s senses. Immediately, all the tedious frustration of the past few days sloughed away. Colors and smells and sensations became more vibrant.
“Now this is how you make a game,” Scott said, enthusiasm creeping into his voice.
The loading screen faded away and a grid with all his saved characters appeared.
“Welcome, Scott Bayani!” the announcer boomed, his voice matching the epic tone of the intro scene. “The battle awaits! Which character would you like to select?”
“OG,” Scott said.
The Level 28 High Combat Cleric flashed twice, then everything started spinning. The character selection screen disappeared and Scott found himself standing on the streets of Averi City.
He took a deep breath, absorbing the smells of spicy, sizzling meat, the clank of armor, and the rustle of fabric playing under the murmurs, laughter, and shouts of the crowd. There were a crapton of people on right now. Still, Scott couldn’t stop himself from grinning as he set off toward the marketplace. This was what he’d been missing. He felt so fucking alive. Like he’d been half asleep for the last week, checked out in every possible way, and now he was awake again and able to enjoy life.
First thing first, he was going to find the dumbest, easiest, dicking-around quest and go get it done. A palate cleanser. He had to get his last month of being jerked around out of his head. Because he was done with that cocksucker Roark the Griefer. Screw that guy. Scott wasn’t wasting another freaking second on that assclown. Sooner or later, the admins would get involved and fix the Griefer’s pipes good. Hopefully, somebody would be around to screenshot it when that dick got what he deserved.
Scott headed for the Notice Board. He’d pick up something fun and easy he could finish today before he had to go to work. He was down on both gold and gear, thanks to that stinkstar Roark—
Nope. Scott stopped himself, taking a couple of deep breaths, in, out, in, out. He was done even thinking about that loser. That douche wasn’t living rent free in his head for another second.
He cut through the crowd of newbs looking for parties and assassins looking for freelance contracts, getting close enough to read the fluttering notices and wanted posters pinned to the board.
Maybe he could go after an easy bounty. Those paid pretty well, but they took forever to complete. Plus, you almost always had to bring the prisoners in alive.
Clearing pests from a meadery sounded all right. At his level, he would probably end up mowing them down, easy-peasy. That would be pretty satisfying right now. Work out a little pent-up aggression on a bunch of measly plague rats.
Scott was reaching for the tag when he saw someone who looked oddly familiar. A lanky guy in boiled leathers with one of those crooked honkers.
It almost looked like the guy the Griefer had been posing as the last time he fucked around with Scott.
But nah. That just went to show how bad the assbag had gotten into his head.
Scott grabbed the rat-clearing tag and yanked it down. It respawned immediately.
With a renewed spring in his step, Scott put a marker on the rat-infested meadery and set off to kill some shit. A return to the good days.
Marketplace Intrigue
RANDY SHOEMAKER COULDN’T believe his eyes. He knew what he was seeing was real, but there was nothing about it that made any logical sense.
Randy twisted out of the way of a rog in Divine plate mail and an olm in mismatched red robes and a Ragged Initiate’s Cowl. The players didn’t slow their stride or say a word to him as he passed. They had no idea he was there. His brand-new admin privileges granted him the ability to wander through Hearthworld completely invisible if he so chose, and he was taking full advantage of it to follow the prime anomaly through the Averi City Marketplace.
Just ahead, Roark the Griefer wove through the crowd. Thanks to his admin tracker, Randy knew it was the Griefer in spite of some sort of illusion spell type modification Roark was using to make himself look human and hide his gamer tag.
No spell meeting that description existed in Hearthworld. Nor was there any way to modify a user’s tag. The game was specifically set up so that spoofing a gamer tag couldn’t be done. That was part of the accountability process—removing anonymity was one of the big ways to keep the
community running without major hiccups. If there was any doubt before that this guy was a modder, there wasn’t anymore. Here was the proof. A player playing as a mob, making trips to the market, buying and selling, talking to NPCs—even eating food—while hiding both his appearance and gamer tag with spells that shouldn’t exist.
Even stranger, he wasn’t on his own or surrounded by PC friends he’d decked out with mods. There were two humans with him. Griff, an NPC skill trainer who was supposed to be waiting in the Sulky Selkie with a fetch quest for players who wanted training in weapons, and Mai, an NPC cooking trainer. According to the information Randy had gathered so far, Roark had somehow changed Mai’s and Griff’s scripts to relocate them from their set locations to his dungeon, the Cruel Citadel.
Holding hands with the cooking trainer was a Knight Thursr in modded armor that shrank his massive form to the size of a large rog. Another impossibility. NPCs and mobs only interacted for rescue quests, and only when a player got within range to save or ignore the attacks.
There was a second mob glued to Roark’s side, a Reaver Champion hiding her face and horns under a PC spell caster’s cloak she shouldn’t have access to. No one looked too closely as they passed—why would they? This was unprecedented, after all—and so they all missed the hints of deep, midnight blue skin and snowy white hair.
Randy scowled, a little surprised to realize he was outraged. Not just that this Roark had somehow infiltrated the project he’d spent the last eight years of his life working on, but that Roark had gone the extra creeper step and modded this female mob so he could indulge some kind of monster girl fetish. She wasn’t real—for all intents and purposes, she was just strings of code—but it still upset Randy to see some jerk using a woman. Even if she was a Troll.
Near the center of the marketplace, the Griefer and his entourage stopped, chatted for a second like a football team in huddle, then broke off, spreading through the market in each direction.
Randy tailed the Griefer, determined to find out what the modder was up to.
Initially, when Randy got his new clearance, he had tried monitoring the anomalies in the Divine dungeon. But after two days of slaving away, only logging out long enough to eat and sleep, all Randy had learned was that the Malaika Heralds, modified by another modder named Lowen, never left the Vault of the Radiant Shield. Ever. Like Roark, Lowen and his anomalies were immune to most of Randy’s admin abilities. System analytics had been worse than useless. He couldn’t boot the modders off. He couldn’t immobilize them. He couldn’t isolate their code. And the data he managed to get was so strange and conflicted he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
The best Randy could do was monitor them. That was fine for the short term.
He didn’t want to confront either of the modders yet. He wanted to know his enemy before he struck, Art of War style, but Lowen never seemed to be doing anything. Roark, on the other hand, was always writing up spells and abilities that didn’t exist in-game, crafting armor and weapons that had no basis in canon, and organizing his Infernal dungeon into a more efficient industrial slaughterhouse for heroes. It was no wonder the Griefer was killing players left and right who should be able to one-shot him; Roark had written himself in abilities that would be radically nerfed if they occurred naturally in the game.
The strangest thing of all, though, was that Roark hadn’t logged out. Not once since he’d logged on a little more than a month ago. For all practical purposes, he’d been on 24/7 for weeks with no apparent change in avatar functionality. Even if the Griefer were running a complex script for his avatar when he was AFK—and how would he even manage that?—there would be some noticeable change in avatar gameplay. But there was none. Not even a few hours’ inactivity where the guy might have been sleeping.
It was mystifying. Absolutely baffling. Frankly, the software engineer in him was begrudgingly impressed, and the programmer in him just had to know how he was doing this. Randy was sure if he just kept dogging Roark’s steps, the Griefer would eventually screw up. No one could play a perfect game forever. Then ... then Randy would have the concrete information he needed to move on.
ROARK FELT EYES ON the back of his neck. He had to force himself not to tense up, and he kept walking as if he didn’t notice. When he reached Mogrifa & Mogrifa, he studied the reflection of the marketplace in the glass set into the door.
The usual crowded jam of heroes filled the paths between the vendors behind him, but none of them were looking his way.
Still he felt the skin down his spine crawling. In Traisbin, when he’d felt that, it had meant it was time to move on to the next place the T’verzet needed his particular skill set.
According to the countdown timer on his Illusion Cloak, he and the others had been asking around the marketplace for twenty minutes. Maybe someone had caught on to his disguise—a hero from Braind_Fish’s party, perhaps. Or PwnrBwner_OG. As he grabbed for the door handle to the bookseller’s, Roark searched the glass once more. No one. Just the ebb and flow of traffic, the occasional press of bodies. But no lingering stares. No obvious tails.
The bell over the door rang as he ducked into Mogrifa & Mogrifa’s.
And nearly collided with Zyra.
There was a glint of wet obsidian as the hooded Reaver retracted her poisoned claws and tucked something into the folds of her cloak.
“I nearly Scratched you,” she hissed, leaning in close enough for him to hear. Her hood shifted as she looked his Illusion over from head to foot. “You look just like one of them.” He could almost hear the sneer in her voice.
For a split second, it was on the tip of Roark’s tongue to tell Zyra that he was one of them, that his Jotnar form had been forced upon him by his arrival in Hearthworld. She knew he wasn’t native to this world. But considering the nearly human face she was hiding beneath her own hood, he doubted she would be very impressed with his true form.
Then he realized the object she’d just hidden from him was a book. He took her by the arm and ducked his head until he could whisper in her ear.
“Are you stealing that?” He glanced toward the counter, where an ancient woman with cloth covering hollow-looking eye sockets stood. As if she could see them, her wrinkled face was turned in their direction. “Look at the sigils around her door.” He nodded at the wooden beams surrounding the exit, each one inscribed with dimly lit runes. He couldn’t read all of them—clearly the Mogrifas had attained a much higher level of Cursed! than he had yet—but the ones he could read involved things like Sudden Flesh Inversion. “Mogrifa has some sort of nasty curses on it, and I’d wager that it’s to stop thieves crossing the threshold with merchandise.”
Zyra twisted her arm out of his grasp. “I bought the book, if you must know. Though for that inflated joke of a price, I’d have been just as well off risking the respawn.”
Roark couldn’t see her face, but with her suddenly closed-off body language, he hardly needed to. If he asked her about the book now, he would get nowhere. Better to let her tell him when she was ready.
“Did they know anything about Variok?” he asked instead, glancing over her shoulder at the blinded hag.
Zyra straightened up, losing the defensive aura immediately.
“I was actually on my way to find you about that,” she said. “According to the Mogrifas, he crossed the Olm Legion of Order. Something about selling stolen pearls.”
“Olm Legion of Order,” Roark repeated, the words sparking something in his mind that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Why does that sound so familiar?”
“Because they’re trying to crush the world under their bootheels of law and order?” she shot back, her voice frigid with disapproval. “Because they’re the ones who killed Mai’s husband? Because they’re the most dangerous force in all of Hearthworld, and they destroy anyone who stands in their way?” Zyra shrugged. “Pick your favorite.”
Movement caught Roark’s attention just before a woman in subpar chainmail, carrying an armload of
books, stopped beside them.
“You guys talking about Bad_Karma?” She said the name in a breathy, infatuated voice, a giddy grin on her face. “He’s so kickass, right?”
“Bad_Karma?” Zyra asked.
“Uh yeah,” the woman said, rolling her eyes. “Only the number one player on the server.”
“Ah, of course.” Roark nodded. “Bad_Karma. No, actually, we were discussing the Legion of Order. We’re looking for a merchant who might’ve run afoul of them.”
“Oh, I gotcha,” she said. “Yeah, that’s the whole Merchant Loyalty quest line. Soon as you start it, they come up missing. It’s no big deal, though. Just a low-to-middie breakout heist.”
“Break out of what?” Roark asked.
“Like, almost always one of the OLO prisons. Here.” The woman opened the door and led them out into the street. Her books disappeared into her Inventory, and she pointed across the marketplace. “So, what you’re gonna do is go check out the Notice Board, see what your guy was wanted for—you have to read the poster or your quest won’t populate—then it’ll show up in your active quests.”
“Thanks,” Roark said, dipping his head in appreciation.
He and Zyra took their leave of the woman and wound their way between the stalls, following her directions.
As they walked, Roark’s hackles rose again. Someone was watching him. He was sure of it.
He spun suddenly on his heel, looking around as if he had missed the stall he’d been heading for.
“You felt it, too?” Zyra asked in a low voice. “Someone’s stalking us.”
“Did you see anyone?”
Her hood shook side to side and a flechette appeared in her fingers.
“Keep walking,” she said, gesturing with her empty hand as if they had come to the conclusion their destination was a little farther on.
Troll Nation Page 4
