Trio of Sorcery (33 page)

“There's some more Chinese gold farmers engaged with it,” Erik said, reporting what one of the troubleshooting game masters was telling him in the real world. “Serge is ready to take them out of play as soon as we get there.”

Serge was probably going to enjoy this. Most people who loved their games hated the gold farmers, likening them to cockroaches. And that was when they were feeling polite.

But the gold farmers had served their purpose against the Wendigo. They kept it occupied, kept it from roaming the zone and ambushing players. What was even better, they apparently kept its attention so fully occupied that it was not able to interfere with the AI to make the zone harder than it should be. As long as the Wendigo was spawning, the rest of the zone ran smoothly; the other problems vanished. Gold farmers never kept much loot on their own avatars, so the Wendigo never got a chance to pick up those precious couple of pieces of loot when it defeated them. And they kept other players, who
might
have had those bits of illusory treasure on them, from engaging the Wendigo themselves.

“Never thought I would be grateful to those greedy—” the
Hawkinglike voice sputtered unintelligibly and Ell realized she still had the profanity filter engaged on this avatar. Well, no way to flip it now.

“Showtime?” she asked. There was a chorus of yesses, and Erik spread a pair of sinister ebony wings and headed off for the location of the Wendigo, followed by the rest of the team.

“How's our countdown?” she asked as they all flew over the dusky countryside, a landscape so mist enshrouded that she had to strain to see the code underlying it.

“The servers are coming down now.”

There were a lot of servers. It would take about thirty minutes to shut them all down. Ell and the devs were not going to engage the Wendigo themselves until it finished off the gold farmers. Which it would. She was pretty sure of that. The servers hadn't come down since the last attempt to patch the beast. No one had ever seen what the Wendigo could and would do if it had all of its consciousness in one place.

They joined the crowd around the fight to watch.

There were at least a hundred people engaged with the creature, and Ell was glad she was on something even better than her home rig with a big fat pipe and a lot of RAM, because she was pretty sure she would otherwise be suffering terminal lag what with all of the powers going off at once. It looked like a Las Vegas show. Fireballs, ice bolts, torrents of pure energy, all poured down on the Wendigo. Swords of metal, flame, and ice slashed at it. Arrows of a dozen styles
arced toward it. In the real world, the landscape around the beast would have been utterly obliterated, but of course, nothing that the players did altered the terrain, so the bushes and trees the Wendigo stood among remained serenely and eerily green. The ground, which should have been pockmarked at best, merely demonstrated cracks and craters that lasted a few seconds and sprouted fires that did nothing to damage the “turf.”

After so long studying the game and the Wendigo, it became apparent to Ell pretty quickly that her speculation was right. The more servers went down, the more of the Wendigo's “self” migrated here. And the more of that “self” there was, the more formidable it became.

It was catching even the gold farmers by surprise.

To coordinate, they generally used the open channel rather than their team channel, and it was usually only the leaders who “said” anything. Now, however, the air over their heads was full of balloons with indecipherable characters, generally followed by one or more exclamation points.

It would have been funny if it hadn't been so grim.

The Wendigo slammed its foot into the ground, knocking half of its attackers over, and a lot of them didn't get up again. Their healers scurried among the fallen, trying to revive them. The Wendigo, acting like an intelligent creature and not an AI creation, ignored the attempts of the bricks to engage its attention and flailed its club at the healers, felling those who were not fast enough to get out
of the way. Someone shouted something in red and boldface, and the fallen vanished, presumably back to a Healing Shrine, while the rest engaged again.

More avatars swarmed into the area as the Wendigo laughed and swung its club.

“Pleese!”
came the shout in the local channel.
“Pleese! Everone to help!”

There was a moment of shock when the onlookers realized that the gold farmers had gotten in so far over their heads that they were not going to be able to get out of this one without logging out. There was another moment as some people realized that there was something very, very wrong with this Wendigo.

Then there was a flurry of activity. About half of the avatars watching either fled to the Zone Portal or logged out in place. The rest waded in.

“Man,” said Kathy, “I hope you guys are recording this.”

If the fight had been epic before, it was of Hollywood proportions now. There must have been close to five hundred avatars piling onto the Wendigo, so many that a lot of them couldn't even get within close combat distance. Those that could fly took to the air and layered themselves above the ones on the ground. Within moments, there was literally not a pixel of the Wendigo to be seen; nothing but an enormous stack of avatars and powers.

And then, with a deafening roar, the stack burst apart
and avatars went flying in all directions, to land in twisted, unmoving tangles all around the beast.

The Wendigo was still standing.

None of the players were. Except Ell, Tom, Kathy, and Erik.

The Wendigo turned toward them as the gold farmers' avatars vanished—their accounts suspended for exploits and cheating. As for the rest of the PCs…

“
Run!
” The word sprouted in local chat balloons all over the field, like a blossoming of strange flowers over the greensward. Many avatars fled or disappeared.

Ell's team stepped forward.

The Wendigo laughed—and stopped abruptly as Ell triggered all of her combat spells and all of her game powers at once. The rest followed suit, except that they didn't have any real magic. They didn't need to. The real-world magic was serving its real purpose, which was to rivet the attention of the Wendigo on her. She looked like a walking fireworks display within the game and to anything that could see magic.

“Holy @#%$!” said someone nearby. “Devs!”

And the cheering began, at least among the real player avatars—interesting. This wasn't the real world. They didn't know this horror was a real threat. And yet they were acting as if this team had come to save them.

They're invested in the system. They believe. Intellectually they know that this is a game, but their guts tell them it's real.
And belief is power…power we are taking away from it. The ranger isn't gonna like that, Yogi.

She stepped well in front of the rest, lit up like a Christmas tree with magic. For form's sake, she also shouted at it, even though she knew very well that the code to grab the thing's attention wouldn't work, and it wouldn't understand English. And she didn't know Ojibwa.

“Hey, you! Your father gets studied by proctologists, and your mother took First Place at the Kennel Club Show!”

There was a fair amount of “WTF?” behind her, which her speech synthesizer rendered as “dubyou-tee-eff” until finally some bright boy a bit faster on the uptake than the rest blurted, “She said its dad is an @$$40L3 and its mother is 61TCH!” That gave rise to a veritable torrent of LOL and LMAO and other acronyms the speech synthesizer was sputtering on. But she was already moving, because the magic alone was enough to tell the Wendigo it had a
real
enemy to face, and it was coming straight for her.

As the huge club slammed into the ground half a foot from her, she was terribly grateful that she was the one in control now, and not Toby. Maybe the Wendigo couldn't kill her in here—but it could certainly make her hurt.

She dashed sideways, spun, and slashed at the Wendigo's legs. It howled and stomped a foot the size of a Yugo, knocking them all backwards. For Ell, landing
hurt
. She cursed, not caring who heard her and blowing the
Rated-T-For-Teen right out of the water. But she also got right back up again, feeling a wash of warmth as Tom hit her with a “healing spell”—the game kind, not the real-world kind. The pain disappeared.

Erik's arrows kept the thing busy swatting them away like pesky insects, while she got to her feet again.

This time she came at it from the rear, with a combination of an overhand slash followed by a sideways cut that also took her out of range again. The Wendigo howled and something utterly unexpected happened.

One of the nearby groups of NPCs, computer-generated citizens and nonadversarial characters, just—vanished. And the Wendigo's health indicator went back up to full.

This time it was Tom's turn to curse, though he did it in team-speak. “He can't
do
that!” Tom shouted, after a good polysyllabic spew.

“He did it,” Erik pointed out. “We just have to keep him away from the personified objects.”

“Ell, he's eating NPCs!” Kathy said. “I'll get someone to try and herd them—”

“No, don't!”
That was Erik. “The only person who can herd NPCs is a game master or a dev, and—”

“No no no no, we do
not
want someone with god-mode in here!” Tom replied.

“I'll try to keep it away from the NPCs,” Ell shouted back, rushing in for a fast double swipe and jumping away again. She had to get the Wendigo focused on her long enough to see what she was carrying.

That was going to take a while, because all the loot components she was carrying to create her actual spells would conceal the specific things the Wendigo was looking for, at least for a time

And that was the point. It had to think she had these two rare items by accident—part of a massive pile of loot she just happened to be carrying around. If it ever got the hint that this was a trap…

Ellen hurled another insult at it, while Kathy dashed in and out again, much faster than Ell was. Erik poured down withering covering fire. He and Kathy damaged the Wendigo exponentially more than Ellen could.

The Wendigo backhanded her, and for a moment, as her avatar went flying through the air, Ell herself was physically blinded with pain. But Tom was right on her with the heals. She felt another burst of pain as she hit, then Tom's fix went in and she got back up on her feet.

Suddenly, the Wendigo stopped moving. It stared at her.

She continued to behave as if it was about to attack her. She had to. She didn't want it to realize there was a person riding the avatar, rather than just pushing buttons on the other side of the screen.

It had to take the bait. It had to.

Tom first realized that there was something very odd about Ell's avatar when they all confronted the Wendigo.

At first, he couldn't put a finger on what bothered him; it just seemed that there was something different about it. He knew what it wasn't—it wasn't that it didn't have any effects auras, because they'd shut off the auras to keep their stations from lagging during the fight-to-come. And it wasn't anything about how the avatar looked—he'd seen far more outlandish creations in the time he'd been working on the game. But there was something about it that bothered him, down at the subconscious level.

It wasn't until he put his own avatar into a “forced rest position,” because he hated how it fidgeted otherwise, that it dawned on him.

Her avatar wasn't fidgeting. But it wasn't in any of the “rest” positions, either.

This was something that every avatar, even the god-mode signature avatars, had coded right down at the most basic level. To keep the game from looking like a field of statues whenever characters “stood around” to talk about something, the avatars were coded to go through a repeating loop of five different positions. Left hand on hip, left foot forward. Hand down. Left foot back. Both hands on hips, right foot forward. Both hands down. He referred to it as “fidgeting”—most players got used to it, but it drove him mad. He always put his avatar into “default rest one,” which was hands clasped thoughtfully behind the back. There were other rest positions, like feet wide apart with hand on sword hilt; he just happened to like that one.

Stevie the Elf wasn't posed like any other avatar. She
had her left arm crossed over her abdomen, her right elbow resting in her left hand, her right fist resting on her chin and mouth.

That had never been coded for.

Now, either Ellen McBride was the greatest game programmer
ever,
to get into the core character coding and add that—in which case, what did she need the rest of them for?—or there was something seriously bizarre going on.

He became even more convinced when she finally moved and began jeering at the Wendigo. The avatar didn't perform any of the standard taunting moves. Instead, she was waving both hands over her head, then blowing raspberries. Which was very funny and visually arresting, and certainly got the Wendigo's attention—but it was an alteration to the core programming.