“Which guys?”
“Like you said. I came up with a sort of watch list of all the da G shou,” Corvallis said. “Or people likely to be associated with them. Added up their clicks per minute.” Meaning the number of times per minute that these players hit a key or a mouse button. The figure would be zero, of course, for a player who was not logged in, and some frighteningly high number for one who was embroiled in combat, and somewhere in between for someone who was logged in but just wandering around or socializing. “This is summed over about a hundred different da G shou–affiliated characters, showing the last two weeks.”
Beyond that, C-plus didn’t have to say much, since the graph spoke for itself. It started at a low-to-middling level, then ascended exponentially over the course of several days, then suddenly dropped to almost zero. After that, a few spikes poked up through the noise floor, but there was basically nothing.
“I can’t read the time scale from here,” Richard said.
“It gets huge last week, when REAMDE was spiking and you were flying over the Torgai,” Corvallis said. “It flatlines around five in the afternoon on Friday.”
“Seattle time?”
“Yeah.”
Richard consulted his time zone app. “Eight in the morning Xiamen time,” he said. “Hold on a sec.” He used his browser’s history menu to pull up one of those English-language stories about the suicide bomber in Xiamen. “That’s a couple of hours before the terrorist blew himself up.”
“Say what!?”
“Never mind.”
“Since then, the da G shou have been losing control over the Torgai region to incursions by more powerful factions,” C-plus reported. “An army of three thousand K’Shetriae is advancing on its northern border as we speak.”
“Bright, or Earthtone?”
“Bright.”
“Hmm. Gold must be lying knee-deep on the ground.”
“Some places, yes. But a lot of it has been Hidden.” A catch in his voice signaled his use of the word’s majuscular form. It had not been hidden in the sense of being stashed under a pile of leaves, but Hidden by the use of magical spells. “Basically, all of the gold that the da G shou could recover before they went dark on Friday is Hidden, and everything that has been deposited since then is just lying there for the taking.”
“How much has been Hidden?”
“You want that in gold pieces or—”
“Dollars.”
“About two million.”
“Holy Christ.”
“Another three million is lying on the ground.”
“That is just the last couple of days’ ransom money, you’re saying.”
“Yes,” Corvallis said, “but the drop rate is declining rapidly as the infection gets under control. Ninety percent of our users have now downloaded the security patch. So it’s not going to go much beyond that.”
“Okay,” Richard said, “so what is my situation, if I’m a da G shou? I know where two million dollars’ worth of gold pieces is Hidden but I have lost control of the territory where it’s stashed.”
“You have to sneak in,” Corvallis said, “and recover the stuff one stash at a time…”
“… and then sneak out and get to an MC without being ripped off,” Richard concluded. In the back of his mind, he was worrying about how he was going to explain this to John—definitely not a T’Rain kind of guy. “Which could actually be difficult to pull off, if the Torgai falls under the control of people who know what they’re doing. I mean, with that kind of money at stake, there would be plenty of financial incentive to set up a heavy security cordon.”
“A Weirding Ward costs about one gold piece per linear meter,” C-plus said, referring to a type of invisible force-field barrier that could be erected by sufficiently powerful sorcerers.
“Cheaper if you harvest the Filamentous Cobwebs yourself,” Richard retorted, referring to the primary ingredient needed to cast a Weirding Ward.
“Not as easy as you make it sound, given that the Caves of Ut’tharn just got placed under a Ban of Execration,” countered Corvallis, referring, respectively, to the best place to gather Filamentous Cobwebs and a powerful priestly spell.
“Who did that? Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up the last couple of days…”
“The High Pontiff of the Glades of Enthorion.”
“Sounds Earthtone to me.”
“You got it.”
“Some kind of strategic move in the Wor?”
“I’m not privy to the High Pontiff’s innermost thoughts.”
“Anyway,” Richard said, “that Ban wouldn’t prevent Earthtones from getting in there, if they were exempted from the Ban by a Frond of Peace that had been consecrated by the said Pontiff.”
“I forgot about the Frond of Peace loophole,” said Corvallis, crestfallen.
“It’s okay, you’re new here.”
C-plus considered it. “So you’re saying that Earthtones might actually have an advantage over Brights in seizing control of the Torgai.”
“Kind of,” Richard said.
Corvallis raised an eyebrow.
“More to the point,” Richard went on, “this gives us a way to encourage Earthtones. Make them think they have a chance of turning back those three thousand Bright K’Shetriae you mentioned, and getting control of the three million bucks’ worth of gold pieces that they can see—which would go a long ways toward financing the Wor.”
“Could you help me peel back the layers?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Of your Machiavellian strategy? Because I can see that there is way more calculation and cynicism going on here than I can ever possibly comprehend—”
“It’s simple,” Richard insisted. “There are all of about two layers. We have no way to track down the da G shou. Hell, forget about even tracking them down. We have no way to even gather more data about the little fuckers until we can get them to log on, right?”