Damn. Asshole doesn’t even have the decency to carry anything worth stealing.
She sighed at the inventory screens and reached up to close them, but froze when she spotted the pack of mines.
Hang on a second… I wonder…
She closed the pickpocket window and backed up. Once free of risk, she accessed her inventory again and opened the container holding the mines, separating it out into ten individual items. When she ‘used’ one of the little black hockey-puck-sized devices, she got a mini menu that allowed her to set the charge timer.
The level sixty mine would incinerate Bruno three times over. She set the timer for five minutes and placed the puck on the floor behind the chair.
“You dropped something,” said the thug by the right wall. He rushed over, picked up the mine, and handed it to her.
Without her doing anything, the hockey puck disappeared from the guy’s hand and reappeared in her inventory. Its icon had a lit-up timer, marking it as still active and ticking down.
Shit! She looked around in a momentary panic, searching for a place to ditch the explosive before she killed herself.
Hold on a sec… it’s in my inventory and the timer’s still going down. She calmed and slipped back into stealth. Pickpocketing works in two directions.
Again, she crept up on Bruno and reached for his belt. She forgot to breathe, wound up with anxiety that she’d fail the pickpocket check and start a combat. Her bright-pink nails crept closer and closer to Bruno’s side. One more inch… Come on…
The inventory screens popped open.
She slouched with a breath of relief. Hmm. Maybe they let him be easy to pickpocket since he’s got nothing worth taking. Grinning like a fool, she transferred the armed mine from her inventory to his, a reverse pickpocket.
He didn’t react.
Just to be totally certain, she armed two more mines and set them to the same time remaining as the first one, now down to four minutes and three seconds, and put them in Bruno’s inventory. After they transferred, she closed the interface, backed away from his detection distance, and dropped out of stealth. Casual, she walked out of the room and returned to the bar. Hmm. Probably shouldn’t leave the building so I get credit for the kill… assuming this works. Time seemed to drag to a standstill as she paced around the bar tables.
The building shuddered with a powerful explosion that knocked most of the dead neon signs off the walls, caused the jukebox to turn on, and sent all the NPC patrons running around in random panic. All four thugs in the bar room drew handguns and went into a combat pose. Two of them said, “I think I heard something. Did you hear that?” at the same time, but they didn’t open fire on anyone.
“Quest Update” appeared in gold-orange letters, lingered a moment, and faded away.
Fawkes stood still, the picture of total innocence. Thirty seconds later, the thugs put their weapons away. She hurried back down the hall. Everything in the office had become ‘broken’ versions of the former items. Books littered the floor, some on fire. The desk had ceased to exist, as had Bruno. Pieces of the three bodyguards lay scattered around among the books, and a circular red stain marred the ceiling above where Bruno had been sitting.
The gore had enough cartoonishness to it that she laughed.
“I can’t believe that worked!”
Sure enough, when she checked the mission log, it showed the job as completed.
A glowing box appeared on the floor under the blood splat. She recognized a loot drop from an ‘enemy with no lootable corpse left’ right away and pounced on it. When a sleek black laser pistol with purple handgrips appeared floating inside a blue border, she let out a squee of delight.
The randomizer had given her a CL32 ‘heavy’ laser pistol, a level forty ‘blue quality’ weapon, which put it roughly equivalent with a level forty-five ‘common’ one. The damage range of 142-213 more than doubled her current weapon (60-90). Then again, she had been using it since level thirty. She rushed the new one into her ‘equipped item’ slot, and the graphic on Fawkes’ hip changed to the somewhat-longer―and much cooler looking―CL32.
“Yes!” She giggled.
Another object appeared, a standard data pad.
“Huh… what’s this?” She grasped it and hit the button. The screen lit up with a text message:
We lost the signal trace out in the middle of nowhere by this trinary star system. The ship had taken so much damage, we had to turn back. I don’t even remember where the heck we were… only that the middle star was blue. The debris field is still out there. As soon as I find a crew, I’m going back.
Below that, a line contained a string of random numbers and letters, which she figured as data corruption.
She scratched at her head. “Odd. Some kind of flavor text I guess, like the data corrupted.”
“Quest update” faded in for a second or two and disappeared.
“Oh, it started a quest.” She smirked and opened the log.
A new mission―The Lost Dreadnaught―appeared with the comments: “I found a datapad that looks like a couple of salvage operators got more than they bargained for. I wonder what’s out there… or even where to start looking. I have a feeling it could be worth a lot of money… like ten million dollars.”
Fawkes gasped. “Holy shit! This is the prize quest!” She squealed again and bounced on her toes. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Oh shit!” She started to hyperventilate with excitement, then froze, wondering if video game avatars could hyperventilate. Holy crap, Eric and the others are going to shit their pants. She bit her lip, dreading the idea she might not be able to share the quest with them, but when she saw that the share quest button hadn’t been greyed-out, she cheered.
Her crew had a shot to chase down ten million real dollars!
“What the fuck?” asked a deep voice, scratchy and modulated with a semi-robotic twinge. A hulking form in black-paneled armor and a spacecraft pilot helmet had stopped one-step into the room, gazing around at the destruction. ‘Reaper913,’ another player, looked at her. A red tinge to his name identified him as either a frequent player-killer or someone who’d done enough ‘bad stuff’ that the in-game law had an open bounty on him. Any player to take him out would receive an email with a ‘mission bounty’. Considering his level showed at forty-six, and his armor looked like what a soldier class would wear, she had no interest in combat. “You killed Bruno?”
“Uhh, I just got here.” She pointed at the stain on the ceiling. “I think he had a bad meatball or something. You ever see a splat like this before?”
Reaper913 tromped over, heavy armored boots thunking across the floor. He halted beside her and gazed up at the ceiling in silence for a little while. “That’s kinda messed up. Nope. Never saw a splat like that on the damn ceiling.” He looked her over and emitted a grunt of contempt at her crummy gear, probably deciding it not worth it to kill and loot her. “Dammit. Spent an hour flying here to turn in a damn job.”
“Yeah, I’ve been waiting for him to respawn, but… I think I’m gonna go do something else.”
Leaving the other player to curse and kick debris around, Fawkes hurried back outside and activated her motorcycle.
Interactive
6
Fawkes ran solo missions around the city for a few hours, enough to hit level thirty-eight by the time the others in the group began to trickle online around seven that night. Nighthawk had logged in a little after three in the afternoon, but other than a ‘hey what’s up’ text, didn’t talk much. The social window showed him on a different planet, Galphaius, where all the missions started at level 44. He, too, had leveled up, hitting forty-three. It took all her self-control not to tell him that she’d gotten the drop for the contest mission. She wanted to wait until the whole group got together.
Axillon99 had a relatively severe leveling curve for online games. The first five levels went by fast. Someone who knew their way around MMOs in general could hit fifth level in about ten hours of play time. After th
at, the brakes screeched. The hardcore people could pull gaining a level a week up until around thirty, then closer to one per two weeks. She’d heard rumors that past level fifty, even the ‘I have no life’ players would only gain a level every three months or so.
It didn’t matter that much. The developers tuned all of the ‘endgame’ raid content for level sixty. Once a player hit that point, they could only obtain more power by collecting ‘epic’ or purple quality items from participating in raids. Aside from a few super-rare cases of ability-granting items, they wouldn’t gain any new skills or tricks until CSI came out with an expansion pack that raised the level cap and added more, higher level, content. Of course, since the game had been out for two years and only around thirty percent of the player base had reached level cap, no one expected an expansion pack any time soon. The game had launched with so much stuff to do, it didn’t seem necessary yet. Not a day went by that someone didn’t post about finding a new hidden instance on some planet or a never-before-seen world boss.
Fawkes zoomed across Xiānjìng City on her e-bike, heading for the starport. Her heart nearly leapt into her throat when she swerved around a cargo transport doing 175 MPH and almost hit the police car in front of it. Real world dread faded in a moment when the NPC cop ignored her.
“Oh, holy shit,” she rasped, white-knuckling the handlebars. “Maybe I shouldn’t get a real bike. I’d forget I’m not in a game and kill myself, or worse―lose a whole paycheck.”
Her pulse still racing from the terror of a giant traffic ticket, possibly arrest, she slowed to a more modest 100 MPH for a few blocks. The game’s police usually reacted only to players shooting civilian NPCs, causing property damage, or attacking other player characters in certain designated ‘safe zones’ designed to give new players a chance to get going before griefer killers made them quit.
It didn’t take long for the thrill of her good news to chase away the spike of adrenaline. Fawkes drove her bike straight up the giant escalator into the starport, but it disappeared out from under her a short distance past the entrance. Some areas restricted vehicles in a less realistic manner than having doors too small to allow them to pass.
Thin borders around dark silicon-blue floor tiles lit up wherever anyone stepped on them, creating an endless wash of moving light along the ground. Every time she went into a starport, there would always be at least one or two first-time players walking around, mesmerized by the light-up floor.
She rushed past a group of player characters who’d set up ‘merchant stations,’ trying to sell in-game wares and a few who tried to sell real-world products. Next to a large, square installation where holographic fish glided around an arrangement of alien plant life, one female character in a barely-existent garment of thin metal struts and gossamer fabric danced for tips.
A forlorn-looking boy of about seven walked by, calling out “Sprocket, here Sprocket” over and over. She’d done that quest the first night the crew had spent on this planet. The boy’s missing dog had fallen down a maintenance shaft out on the starship landing area, and couldn’t get out. She, and thousands of other players, had saved him, only for the mission to reset and the poor virtual golden retriever to wind up stuck in the hole again.
Damn the realism. She forced herself to look away from the crying boy before she got upset. If the game would let her repeat the quest, she would, just to feel better.
She headed down the tunnel to the docking node, and from there went into the boarding tube where Stormbringer perched.
“Welcome back, Fawkes,” said Galileo, the ship’s AI personality, as the outer hull door opened.
“Thanks.”
She hurried to the central room, where Nighthawk sat at the huge round table, playing combat chess with the pilot, Kavan Das. His avatar appeared to be in its late forties, with neat black hair, a deep tan, and a healthy amount of muscle under his armor. The character struck her as a chimera of a hot Mediterranean super spy and a pro MMA fighter. Fawkes (and Dakota) at twenty-two could’ve been his daughter by age, but a girl could have fantasies. The new Neurona 4’s vastly improved throughput allowed the game to add a hint of an intoxicating cologne to his presence.
He still showed as level thirty-four, suggesting he hadn’t had the time for solo missions in a while. No one in the crew, except maybe Eric, was in any rush to start hitting endgame raids, so there hadn’t been any bitching about his slow leveling. She recalled his real name as William, and vaguely remembered him mentioning he worked as a software developer―though not for CSI. He did something boring, like accounting applications or some such.
Axillon99 offered two ways for a player to get their own starship. The cheaper method involved taking ‘pilot’ as one’s alternate class and then working through an exhaustive set of missions that took the dedicated players three or four months to finish. That gave them a tiny Cobra-class ship, basically a flying wedge, that they could use to run solo missions. From there, it became an economics game, trying to earn enough money either by cargo runs, asteroid mining, or bounty hunting to buy the next biggest ship, and so on.
The other method, the one Kavan used, involved buying the ‘extreme collector’s edition’ of the game for a staggering $900. Of course, that also included a lifetime subscription without monthly fees, so… perhaps it hadn’t been as stupid as it sounded to her at first. He’d started with a ship about half the size of the Stormbringer, but had already upgraded to it by the time Fawkes ran into them. Kavan and Nighthawk had been stuck on a ‘go here and kill these bad guys’ mission, despite their both being soldier classes. Granted, Kavan had specialized in defense as a ‘tank,’ which was awesome in groups, but the lower damage output made some quests a pain to solo.
Fawkes had skipped that quest, being a rogue, since it appeared to involve heavy up-front combat. However, when Kavan asked her to help them out (and shared the quest) she decided to pitch in. As it turned out, the enemy had an auramancer way in the back, healing the enemies faster than Kavan or Nighthawk could take them out. While the guys kept the pirates busy at the front, Fawkes snuck in and around and attacked the healer from behind. With the NPC woman struggling to keep herself alive, the pirates out front fell fast, and they rescued the kidnapped settlers.
After that, Kavan invited her to join the crew since they were still missing one person and didn’t have a rogue yet.
“Hey,” said Fawkes on the way over to a seat. “What’s up?”
“Privateer mission tonight.” Kavan rubbed his chin, eyeing the holographic chess pieces.
She glanced at the half-consumed beer in front of Kavan and the choco-coffee by Nighthawk. That started her wondering if drinking coffee inside the game world would trick her brain into waking up for real. “You guys ever wonder if virtual coffee would wake us up?”
“No effect,” said Kavan. “About the only thing it does is taste right.”
“Think I’ll grab a beer,” said Nighthawk.
Kavan shifted his gaze up from the game board to him. “You sure you wanna do that? Gonna need you sharp in a few minutes.”
“Oh.” Nighthawk shrugged. “I got those punks by four levels. Shouldn’t matter, but okay.”
Whenever the Stormbringer got into a combat encounter, Nighthawk went out in a Gremlin fighter craft. It matched his personality: all guns, no defense. It had the overall shape of a broad head arrow with curved sides, and two giant particle cannons at the wingtips. To Fawkes, the design looked ridiculous. The gun tubes on either side should snap off as soon as the fighter pulled a hard turn, but being a video game, logic took a back seat to ‘looks cool.’
A little pink ogre about two inches tall shambled forward two squares on the game board, roared, and smashed a blue goblin flat with one punch.
“Check,” said Nighthawk.
Kavan leaned over the board, appraising the lay of holographic pieces.
Soft boot clanks came down the hallway. Angel813 glided in, the crew’s medic. Despite her character name, she h
adn’t made a Niath. Long, ghostly white hair trailed after her like a gossamer mass of spidersilk. She had Chinese features with bright blue eyes, and a mild accent. In her mid-to-late thirties, she settled into a ‘big sister’ niche to Fawkes, and tended to ‘mother’ the whole crew, except for Kavan. Fawkes suspected her of being sweet on him, though as far as she’d seen, he had never returned any of her subtle glances.
Her green uniform had silvery armor panels over the vital spots, along with the standard medic insignia of a white field with a red cross on each shoulder. Seams in the armor emitted a faint violet glow. Rumor had it that in player-versus-player fights, sometimes healers would be spared if they didn’t attack, but computer-controlled enemies didn’t care. Fawkes thought otherwise: the healer usually wound up as the primary target.
Dakota had no small amount of jealousy for their medic―most of her gear was blue quality, with about half (including that armor) being purple. Despite her character having only reached level forty-one, Angel813 had the gear to stand a reasonable chance against enemies many levels over her. Again, Dakota opened an ‘inspect’ window and drooled at the armor and its 500-point damage force-field ability―an extremely rare bonus.
Some of the advanced armors could project a stealth field. She daydreamed about finding one of those. Players widely regarded the rogue class as weak for most of the level spread, but after level forty-eight, they verged on overpowered. Their best attacks only worked from stealth, but once gear or other special abilities allowed them to hide at will (or even use ‘stealth only’ abilities out in the open) they became obnoxious. Most of the strategy sites regarded the rogue class as the best one-on-one class, capable of melting down any opponent other than a tank. In group missions, they had some of the better damage output ratings―provided the terrain allowed them to get behind the bosses. Nighthawk and his gunslinger could keep up, but he didn’t need to worry about positioning at all. A well-played rogue could pull a little ahead, doing three times the work for about a ten percent gain in DPS. The same way players tended to think of rogues as king of one-on-one, they regarded gunslingers as an ‘easy’ class for lazy players.
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