FUDD HAD A dozen vassals, each of whom had another dozen: enough to keep him in beer. His lord was another character owned by Richard, who didn’t get played that often. Having no particular responsibilities, Fudd had been hanging out in a corner of this fortification that was designated as a Chapterhouse, which only meant that it was a safe place for characters of Fudd’s type to be parked, and to practice their bothaviors, for hours, days, or even weeks at a time while their players were not logged in. In the jargon of the game it was called a home zone or simply HZ, by analogy to children’s games of tag. For a miner, the HZ would be an actual mine with its associated canteen and sleeping quarters, for a peasant it would be a farm, and so forth. Warrior-mage knights like Fudd had fancier and more expensive HZs in the form of Chapterhouses, most of which were generic—serving any character of that general type—and a few of which were limited to specific orders, by analogy to the Knights of Malta, Knights Templar, and so on, of Earthen yore. A whole set of conventions and rules had grown up around HZs. They were necessary to maintain the game’s verisimilitude. You couldn’t have characters just snapping out of existence when their player’s Internet connection got broken or their mom insisted that they log out, and so most players tried to get their characters back to an HZ when it was time to stop playing. In cases of force majeure (e.g., backhoes, or Mom slamming the laptop shut on the player’s fingers), the character would slip into an artificial intelligence (AI) mode and attempt to automatically transport itself back to an HZ. Trotting along like zombies, these were easy pickings for bandits and foemen. Nolan kept it that way to discourage players from simply logging out when their characters were embroiled.
Anyway, now that Richard was in control, it was safe for Fudd to leave the Chapterhouse, and so, as Richard prodded keys on his keyboard, the white-bearded warrior mage unlimbered himself from his meditative pose and headed for the exit of the HZ. The way out led through the tavern where Fudd had been taking his meals in Richard’s absence. The tavernkeeper had mail for him: remittances from his network of vassals, which went into Fudd’s purse. From there he exited to a sort of arming and mustering room, a transition zone between the HZ and the outside world. Fudd shrugged off an invitation from a trio of characters who had figured out that Fudd was decently powerful and who wanted him to join them on some kind of raiding party. For many who played these sorts of games, going on raids and quests in the company of one’s friends—or, in a pinch, with random strangers—was the whole point. Richard had always been more inclined to solo questing. Rather than explaining matters to them, he simply used a magic spell to render himself invisible. Rude, but effective. Angry “WTF?s” rolled up the chat interface as he slipped out the doorway.
Fudd was not going on a quest anyway. Richard didn’t have that kind of time. He just wanted to wander around the world a bit and see what was happening. He’d been doing this a lot recently. Something was changing; there was some kind of phase transition or something under way in the society of the game. Richard didn’t know much about phase transitions other than it was what happened when ice melted. Working at Corporation 9592, however, had brought him into contact with a sufficient number of nerds with advanced degrees that he now understood that “phase transition” was an enormously portentive phrase that those guys only threw around when they wanted the other nerds to sit up and take notice. Suddenly something happened; you couldn’t exactly make out why. Or maybe—an even more haunting thought—it had happened already and he was too dim-witted, too out of touch, to get it. Which was actually why Fudd existed. Richard had other characters in T’Rain that controlled huge networks of vassals and possessed godlike powers, but for that very reason they never had to participate in the same grunt-level questing and moneymaking on which the majority of customers spent most of their time. Fudd was powerful enough to move around the world without getting jumped and killed every ten minutes, but not so powerful that he didn’t have to work at it.
Invisible, Fudd jogged around the courtyard of the fortress, which was home to a bazaar or market comprising a number of separate stalls: an armorer, a swordsmith, a victualler, a moneychanger. He eavesdropped on the latter for a minute to make sure that nothing weird was happening with exchange rates. Nothing ever was. Richard’s plumbing was working just fine. Something in Devin’s department might be fucked, but Corporation 9592 was still making money.
The characters running the market stalls, and the customers browsing them, broke down into three racial groups: Anthrons, which were just plain old humans; K’Shetriae, which were rebranded elves; and Dwinn (originally D’uinn before the Apostropocalypse had forever altered T’Rain’s typography), which were rebranded dwarves. Three additional racial groups existed in the world, but they were not represented here, because those three other groups were associated with Evil, and this was a border fort just on the Good side of the border. K’Shetriae and Dwinn were generally Good. Anthrons could swing either way, though all the ones here (unless they were Evil spies) were Good.
He wasn’t seeing anything new here. He invoked a Hover spell. Fudd levitated into the air above the square court of the fortress, gazing down at the two dozen or so characters in the market.
A projectile passed beneath him, arcing down into the court from outside the wall. It landed harmlessly on the ground. Richard zoomed closer and moused over it. The thing was cobalt blue and had an ungainly shape. As he got closer he could see that it was an arrow, its warhead and fletching cartoonishly oversized, its shaft much too thick. They had to be modeled in this style if they were to be visible at all. Video screens, even modern high-resolution ones, could not depict a fast-moving arrow from a hundred feet away in any form that would be detectable to the human eye, and so a lot of the projectiles and other small pieces of bric-a-brac in the game—forks and spoons, gold pieces, rings, knives—were done in this big oafish style, like the foam weapons wielded by nerds in live-action role-playing games.
This arrow, however, was even fatter and stupider-looking than the norm, and when Richard zoomed in on it, he saw why: it had a scroll of yellow paper rolled around its shaft and tied with a red ribbon. The interface identified it as a TATAN MESSAGE ARROW.