Probably he whiffed of Laundry business — and that set off one of the traps, which yanked him in."
"How do you get inside a game?" asks Pinky, looking hopeful. "Could you get me into Grand Theft Auto: Castro Club Extreme"
Brains glances at him in evident disgust. "You can virtualize any universal Turing machine," he sniffs. "Okay, Bob.
What precisely do you need from us in order to get the kid out of there"
I point to the laptop: "I need that, running the Dungeon Master client inside the game. Plus a class four summoning grid, and a lot of luck." My guts clench. "Make that a lot more luck than usual."
"Running the DM client — " Brains goes cross-eyed for a moment " — is it reentrant"
"It will be." I grin mirthlessly. "And I'll need you on the outside, running the ordinary network client, with a couple of characters I'll preload for you. The sorceress is holding Pete in the third-level dungeon basement of Castle Storm.
The way the narrative's set up she's probably not going to do anything to him until she's also acquired a whole bunch of plot coupons, like a cockatrice and a mind flayer's gallbladder — then she can sacrifice him and trade up to a fourth-level demon or a new castle or something. Anyway, I've got a plan.
Ready to kick ass"
I hate working in dungeons. They're dank, smelly, dark, and things keep jumping out and trying to kill you. That seems to be the defining characteristic of the genre, really. Dead boring hack-and-slash — but the kiddies love 'em. I know I did, back when I was a wee spoddy twelve-year-old. Fine, says I, we're not trying to snare kiddies, we're looking to attract the more cerebral kind of MMORPG player — the sort who're too clever by half. Designers, in other words.
How do you snare a dungeon designer who's accidentally stumbled on a way to summon up shoggoths? Well, you need a website. The smart geeks are always magpies for ideas — they see something new and it's "Ooh! Shiny!" and before you can snap your fingers they've done something with it you didn't anticipate. So you set your site up to suck them in and lock them down. You seed it with a bunch of downloadable goodies and some interesting chat boards — not the usual MY MAGIC USR CN TW4T UR CLERIC, DOOD, but actual useful information — useful if you're programming in NWScript, that is (the high-level programming language embedded in the game, which hardcore designers write game extensions in). But the website isn't enough. Ideally you want to run a networked game server — a persistent world that your victims can connect to using their client software to see how your bunch o' tricks looks in the virtual flesh. And finally you seed clues in the server to attract the marks who know too damn much for their own good, like Peter-Fred.
The problem is, Bosch World isn't ready yet. That's why I told him to stay out. Worse, there's no easy way to dig him out of it yet because I haven't yet written the object retrieval code — and worse: to speed up the development process, I grabbed a whole bunch of published code from one of the bigger online persistent realms, and I haven't weeded out all the spurious quests and curses and shit that make life exciting for adventurers. In fact, now that I think about it, that was going to be Peter-Fred's job for the next month. Oops.
Unlike Pete, I do not blunder into Bosch unprepared; I know exactly what to expect. I've got a couple of cheats up my nonexistent monk's sleeve, including the fact that I can enter the game with a level eighteen character carrying a laptop with a source-level debugger — all praise the new self-deconstructing reality!
The stone floor of the monastery is gritty and cold under my bare feet, and there's a chilly morning breeze blowing in through the huge oak doors at the far end of the compound.
I know it's all in my head — I'm actually sitting in a cramped office chair with Pinky and Brains hammering away on keyboards to either side — but it's still creepy. I turn round and genuflect once in the direction of the huge and extremely scary devil carved into the wall behind me, then head for the exit.
The monastery sits atop some truly bizarre stone formations in the middle of the Wild Woods. I'm supposed to fight my way through the woods before I get to the town of, um, whatever I named it, Stormville? — but sod that. I stick a hand into the bottomless depths of my very expensive Bag of Holding and pull out a scroll. "Stormville, North Gate," I intone "Why do ancient masters in orders of martial monks always intone, rather than, like, speak normally?) and the scroll crumbles to dust in my hands — and I'm looking up at a stone tower with a gate at its base and some bint sticking a bucket out of a window on the third floor and yelling, "Gardy loo." Well, that worked okay.
"I'm there," I say aloud.
Green serifed letters track across my visual field, completely spoiling the atmosphere: WAY KOOL, B08. That'll be Pinky, riding shotgun with his usual delicacy.
There's a big, blue rectangle in the gateway so I walk onto it and wait for the universe to download. It's a long wait — something's gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.) Inside the North Gate is the North Market. At least, it's what passes for a market in here. There's a bunch of zombies dressed as your standard dungeon adventurers, shambling around with speech bubbles over their heads. Most of them are web addresses on eBay, locations of auctions for interesting pieces of game content, but one or two of them look as if they've been crudely tampered with, especially the assheaded nobleman repeatedly belting himself on the head with a huge, leather-bound copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Are you guys sure we haven't been hacked?" I ask aloud. "If you could check the tripwire logs, Brains ... " It's a long shot, but it might offer an alternate explanation for Pete's predicament.
I slither, sneak, and generally shimmy my monastic ass around the square, avoiding the quainte olde medieval 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 southwest I can see the battlements and turrets of Castle Storm looming out of the early morning mists in a surge of gothic cheesecake. I enter the tavern, 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 my hand out?) "Has the target moved"
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 preexisting crystal ball) and load a copy of the pub. Looking in the back room I see a bunch of standard henchmen, -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-ore fighter-for-hire in Bosch. This ought to turn him into a oneman 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"