Massively Multiplayer, page 21
“Reports of our courtesy have been greatly exaggerated,” the man sneered. “There’s law a-plenty in the better parts of any city, but you’re on your own in the slums. But as it happens, no, I’m not just killing you for the thrills. I’m repaying a debt to an army buddy from your side of the pond.”
“I don’t know anybody in the army.”
“That’s what you think. MadHarp sends his regards.”
A quiver shot through Druin, chilling his blood, but it didn’t prevent him from snapping his hands down to his sides, releasing the throwing knives hidden up each sleeve.
He flung his wrists up and forwards, not even hoping that a knife might hit his target, merely that the distraction would provide him enough time to clear his broad-bladed fighting knives from his leg-sheathes. He dropped into a crouch, preparing to spring forward, but was disconcerted by the snickering of the hooded figure.
The little man had dropped back a step, with one hand stretched out in front of him, bathed in a sickly blue glow. Druin’s throwing knives hung, suspended, above his open palm.
As Druin watched, the knives rotated lazily in the air, then arced back towards him, to hang menacingly in front of his eyes, spitting indigo sparks.
“MadHarp told me you were quick,” the hooded man said mockingly. “He also said you were stubborn. I think he might have said stupid, too. I’m sure he used the phrase ‘prissy punk.’ Now drop your weapons and take your medicine.”
“How did MadHarp even know I was here?” Druin demanded.
“Captain Thunder’s crew aren’t all as idealistic as he is,” the other replied. “’Harp knew which Inn you’d be sent to before you did. He got a message to me and I’ve just been waiting to help him settle up with you. And I’m just the first round – apparently he’s got a whole string of folks lined up. You really must have ticked him off. I bet you embarrassed him in front of somebody. Upset his little chain of command. He hates that. I could have told you. Now drop the blades.”
Druin desperately estimated the distance between himself and the other man, while another part of his brain tried to coldly calculate whether the floating knives would blind him entirely or just on one side. Could he fight blind? The little man was quick, and clearly prepared for anything Druin could throw at him. MadHarp must have briefed him thoroughly.
“Look, whatever he’s paying you...”
“He’s not paying me,” the little man said, shaking his head. “We billeted together during an international training exercise and found we have a mutual dislike of uppity pukes like you. Besides, I get all your money anyway, stupid.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to. Nothing personal. Wait, I take that back; yes it is.” He gestured, and the floating knives drove forward...
...and clattered to the cobblestones, lifeless once more.
“You talk too much,” said a new voice. “Bad habit for an assassin.”
“What the...?” The hooded man spun towards the mouth of the alleyway. A wide silhouette nearly filled the gap between the buildings, outlined by the dim light from the tavern and the street beyond. “Who are you?”
“Depends on how you mean the question,” the new figure answered, stepping forward into the blue glow still emanating from the hooded assassin’s hand.
The newcomer was a large man, heavyset but tall enough to wear it well, dressed in a simple blue surcoat and tunic under a wide belt with a massive silver buckle. He had a neatly trimmed beard, but the rest of his features were hidden under a broad-brimmed leather hat with an amethyst-studded hatband. He leaned on a polished black staff.
“For instance,” he continued in a mellow baritone, “you might mean that you want to know my name. Or my work, here or RL. You might be asking about my interests or hobbies. Of course, none of those is really important to you, since your only real concern is my interference in your little execution here. But no, you’ve got to go asking vague questions about ‘who I am,’ paying attention to my words when you should have been spending this time killing me...”
Druin was, as his companions had reason to know, very quick, but the hooded man was even quicker. His fingers twitched in a complex pattern, and fire bloomed from his fingertips, bathing the bearded man.
“...of course it’s too late now,” the large man continued as though the flames roaring over his body weren’t even there, “because by now I’ve already set up a counterspell while you were standing there with your mouth hanging open.” He shook his head disparagingly. “Fire. It’s always the fire first with guys like you.”
He stepped forward again, implacably closing the distance to the little man. “I understand the appeal, you know. Fire is flashy, fire is direct, it’s got great graphics...”
The hooded man’s fingers twitched again, and a beam of blue-white light sprang from his palm. The air around the beam crackled with frost crystals, and dense fog coiled around it as the air was flash-frozen.
“...and then you jump right to the ice,” the big man droned on, the staff raised sideways now, clearly absorbing the pale beam. “It’s so logical, I know. The enemy is impervious to fire, he must be vulnerable to cold. But that’s the type of binary logic which gets you killed. In the little games we were designing ten years ago, that kind of simplistic dualism worked, but you need to break out of those bad habits.”
He continued to pace resolutely towards the little assassin. “Now if I were you, I’d be a little flustered, I’d be wanting to buy some time, so I’d be thinking seriously about summoning something awful...”
The hooded man’s fingers halted, mid-twitch.
“...or maybe something direct. A cloud of poison, maybe, or a nice, direct death spell...”
The newcomer was looming over the hooded man now, who looked even smaller in the shadow of his bulk. The black staff gleamed. “No? No death spells handy?” The little man shook his head, and Druin was almost sure that he heard him whimper.
“You could always try knifing me,” the giant suggested gently, but the assassin silently shook his head, clearly out of his league.
“Oh well,” the bearded man said, not unkindly. “Sucks to be you.” He laid a finger beside his chin, as if in thought. “You know, you could always try running away.”
This clearly hadn’t occurred to the assassin, who visibly perked up. With one more troubled glance at Druin, he scampered for the mouth of the alleyway, but was brought up short by a call from the newcomer.
“One more lesson,” the larger man rumbled. He raised the black staff, which was now humming malevolently, over his head. “Never take your opponents’ advice. It’s usually a trap.”
He brought the staff down sharply. Where it struck the earth, a line of black fire sprang up, racing in a zig-zagging path for the hooded assassin. The little man bleated in fear and turned to run, but made no more than two steps before the ebony radiance caught up with him, enveloping his form.
He vanished with a sharp snap, like a walnut being cracked open, and the black fire faded away.
“Oh, and when you’re fleeing for your life, don’t stop and turn around just because someone says something enigmatic.” The bearded man shook his head. “Sometimes you teach them and teach them, and they just don’t learn.”
Druin, a slightly quicker study, whirled around to plunge deeper into the alleyway. Maybe there was an exit at the other end. However, before he could even get his legs under him, he was arrested by an enormous hand clamping down on his shoulder.
“Hold it, hold it! I didn’t mean you. Relax. Besides, if you were going to run, the time to do it was while I was schooling your playmate back there. Weren’t you listening?”
“I heard you,” Druin acknowledged. “How dead is he?”
“Not a bit,” said the bearded man, shaking his head. “He’s just thinking about life from a new perspective. Without any weapons. Or clothes. On an island, about thirty miles out to sea from here.” He grinned, suddenly, hugely. “As a newt.”
Druin couldn’t help returning the smile. “Thanks, then. You saved my life, but I guess you already knew that. Thank you very much.”
“Don’t mention it,” the bearded man said seriously. “But you ought to keep out of dark alleyways.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Druin agreed. “Druin Reaver.” He stuck out a hand.
“Packer Divide,” the other replied, shaking it. “Let’s head back to the tavern.”
They turned towards the welcoming light of the main street. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s a fellow American doing over here?”
“How could you tell I’m American?”
“Accent,” said Packer. Druin was a little surprised the large man could hear anything under that enormous hat.
“I’m kind of on a job. I got ordered here. Well not here. Whetstone Pass, about a day away.”
“Quest?” Packer asked, holding the tavern door open.
“Sort of. I don’t really know.”
They found an empty table in one of the Fouled Anchor’s quieter back rooms, and Druin briefly summarized the strange encounter with the Catalyst. The declaration that he must travel to Whetstone Pass in order to oppose an indeterminate threat sounded even more nebulous in the telling than it had when he’d heard it himself.
Packer rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “Sounds pretty fishy,” he said quietly. “I mean, Catalysts don’t usually involve themselves with people in the lower circles, right? No offense.”
“None taken.”
“That’s supposed to be one of the whole draws of getting into the upper circles,” Packer continued thoughtfully. “It’s part of the game’s design, the chance to shape the major plotlines, the ways the countries interact, all that stuff. This sounds like you’d be going up against something powerful, right? And it keeps you from what you were doing, your regular game. Why would you go along with that?”
“I don’t really know,” Druin confessed. “It said ‘evil,’ so I guess I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn’t think about it much. Can Catalysts lie about things like that?”
“Not generally, no,” Packer admitted. “Catalysts can tell half-truths, and of course some lie as a matter of course because it’s icy, but that’s not the case this time.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“Forget about it,” Packer advised. “You were mentioning evil. I take it you consider yourself one of the good guys, then?”
“Sure,” said Druin. “Yes. Maybe. I’m not so sure any more.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. This game used to be the simple part of my life – you make some friends, you beat up some monsters, you get some treasure. Man, compared to getting along with my family, or even college, that was practically effortless.”
“Tell me about that,” Packer suggested softly.
“It’s just like....nothing’s clear any more. I get this sense from my parents sometimes that when they got out of high school everything was straightforward. You went to school, you met the right kind of people, got married, got jobs, had children. The jobs were socially responsible and the children were raised according to the latest child psychology studies, but other than that, I got the impression things hadn’t really essentially changed from the times their parents, and their grandparents grew up. Different flavor, same ice cream shop.”
“And now,” Packer prompted.
“It’s all...chaotic,” Druin sighed. “My parents send me to school, but they’re not really sending me to school because I still live at home with them because housing costs have risen so much no-one my age can afford housing without a job, and you can’t get a job without a degree from a good school. So I live with my parents, except I never see my parents because they spend five out of seven days hooked into their jobs from the VR office suite adjoining their bedroom, so I might as well move out and live with friends, except I can’t ever really move out because even if I did, e-mail and v-mail and texting and chip-implants mean my parents can contact me at any time and check up on what I’m doing and offer ‘helpful’ suggestions about who to date and what to major in even if I’m out doing my laundry because even my laundromat has twenty-four-hour-a-day net service at every single drying station!”
Packer nodded for him to continue, but Andrew couldn’t have stopped at this point if he’d tried.
“And so I go through the motions of becoming an adult while my parents actually look over my shoulder, and I get good grades except I couldn’t do anything but get good grades because my classes are pre-selected according to aptitude tests I took when I was fifteen which declared just how good I’d ever become at anything I ever tried, so it’s less like I’m studying what to do with my life and more I’m like some machine that’s performing tolerably within specs, all while trying to ignore the fact that my sister is maintaining a daily blog on her netsite which catalogs how dysfunctional my family really is. And even if I enjoyed the classes, which I sometimes do, it’s not like I have the slightest idea what to do with my life! I’ve got the same social conscience of all my properly-raised friends, except they all disagree about what to do with their lives too.”
“You’d fight evil, if you could find it,” Packer offered quietly.
“Exactly! Fight poverty, except I don’t know if you do that by becoming a farmer or an economist or a sociologist or a politician. Fight ignorance, except I don’t know if you do that by becoming a school teacher or revamping the educational system to get rid of school teachers. Fight injustice, but I don’t know if you do that by becoming a lawyer or fighting off the modern dependence on lawsuits. And every time I take another class, or cruise another netsite, or talk to another friend, I get another opinion which doesn’t agree with all the other ones!”
“Maybe you have to make your own opinions.”
“Out of what?! Where do we get those if it’s not from understanding the information that’s already there? Why can’t my parents understand how hard that is when there’s just too much information to absorb?”
Packer frowned. “You think yours is the first generation to be confused by the complexity of the world it grows up in? Or overwhelmed by new technology? Hell, people have been facing that since Gutenberg, if not before.”
“No! I’m not that arrogant. But I think we might be the first generation which has embraced that complexity and that technology so completely. In the past, wasn’t it always the wealthy and the established – the parents – who got control of all the new toys? Who controlled the television remote in the 1950’s household? Dad did. Who could afford to buy books when Gutenberg invented the printing press? Adults who already had jobs and education. Now there’s all this noise being generated...it’s like everybody’s shouting, all the time, and my generation are shouting louder than anybody.”
“It sounds like you’ve had this conversation before.”
“What else do you do in college but debate these things? Except there’s never any answers.”
“So you don’t like technology?” Packer gestured with the hand that held the staff, taking in the electronically generated environment around them. “Funny place to be doing that.”
“Not really,” said Druin, visibly calming himself. “Think of what most games are about: escapism, to a fantasy past, or a fantasy future, to a time or place where the lines between good and evil are clear. I was having this discussion with a friend, an actor...he said that the reason lowbrow theater usually outsells Shakespeare is because Shakespeare does too good a job of presenting complex issues and situations, that people want the escape of a simple world, with two-dimensional characters. Heroes. Villains. Victims.”
“Shakespeare sells too,” Packer pointed out.
“Yes, but in smaller doses. Too real.” Druin smirked. “So that’s why I gamed. But it looks like the complexity followed me.”
Packer was silent for a long moment, his chin in his hand. Finally he asked, “have you ever thought of reversing the process?”
“What do you mean?”
“Taking the moral clarity you find in gaming, and applying it to your everyday life? An aptitude test isn’t a Troll, but both are challenges to be overcome. The determination you need to face them is the same.”
Druin looked skeptical. “I don’t follow.”
“Think about the recognizable evils you mentioned. Poverty isn’t a dragon, there’s no head to cut off...but sometimes villages are threatened by plagues, instead of dragons, and what you need then isn’t a sharper sword, but better disease control. In both cases, you decided that hard work, and careful planning, is necessary and worthwhile because you want to save the village. Seems to me that if you know what’s really important to you when you’re gaming, you just need to recognize the same principle in RL.”
It was Druin’s turn for thoughtful pause. “You make it sound so straightforward.”
“I don’t mean to. I think it would be hard. But worthwhile.”
“Sounds like you’ve had this conversation before too,” Druin pointed out.
“I’m thinking of a mentor I had once. Game designer, sharp guy, very idealistic. He thought games should always have something you could take with you, after you logged out...”
Packer trailed off, and his eyes opened wide. “I think I just figured something out, Druin. You’ve unintentionally helped me solve a very important puzzle. Thank you.”
“Uh...you’re welcome?”
There was a faint pinging sound, and Packer became very still, his gaze locked on an empty spot in the air over Druin’s head. After a moment, he unfroze and stood up rapidly.
“I have an urgent call. It’s been a pleasure, Druin Reaver, but I have to go. May I offer you something?”
“You already saved my life,” Druin pointed out.
“Oh, that one was for free. It’s been a long time since I got a chance to teach a turkey like that a lesson. No, this is just something to carry with you.”
Packer reached up to his hatband and plucked out one of the small gray stones. He offered it to Druin, who took it with a bemused expression.
