Good.
“No,” Richard said, “you took it, and put it in your poke.”
“But how could I possibly carry so much gold in that wee bag?”
“That’s the whole point of a poke. It’s magic. Enables you to carry a ridiculous amount of VP and thereby enhances our profit margins like you wouldn’t believe.”
The Don nodded. Even he knew that VP stood for Virtual Property.
“But that is not the point,” Richard went on. “The point is as follows.” And he turned away and hiked back over to the bed. This took long enough that a little band of Var’ skirmishers, almost offensively Bright, had time to scuttle out of the trees to investigate the strange phenomenon of a solitary Anthron, newly created and hence of essentially zero powers, unarmed and unequipped—unshod, even—just standing there like an idiot in possibly the most dangerous region of all T’Rain. It was so uncanny that they were approaching him with a kind of superstitious awe.
As well they might, for Richard, after using certain of his powers to verify his suspicion that they were carrying a lot of money, zotted the whole band into pink mushroom clouds.
“Richard, I’m surprised at you; I didn’t think you were going to stoop to such methods!”
“I’m trying to make a point. I blew them away so fast that they didn’t have time to Sequester any of their belongings.”
“What in heaven’s name does that mean?”
“It means we get to steal all of the VP that they were carrying. Go and pick up all the gold that’s lying on the ground. And while you’re at it, why don’t you grab yourself some fucking shoes?”
“Are you suggesting I loot corpses!?”
“I know. What would Queen Anne say?”
“I’ve no idea!”
“You can take your laptop off that Bible first, if it makes you feel any cleaner about it.”
“No need. I gather this sort of thing happens all the time, in T’Rain.”
Richard resisted the temptation to say people make their livings off it.
Once D-squared had at last solved the user-interface problem of how to pick stuff up and put it in his poke, and had caused the Anthron to loot all the gold, plus some Boots of Elemental Mastery and a Diadem of Scrying that he took a fancy to, Egdod grabbed him (the Anthron, that is) by the scruff of the neck again and flew him, with a velocity that the Don described as “faintly sickening,” about halfway around the planet to visit a moneychanger who, being situated almost at the antipode of where all the action was, was offering fast service and good rates.
It was possible to interact with an MC verbally, and thereby remain “in-world,” which was equivalent to an actor remaining “in character,” but the impatient Richard diverted the Don to a user interface window replete with medievally styled buttons and popup menus. “You want to make a Potlatch to Argelion. It’s the third checkbox down on the right.”
“The god of mammon and lucre!?”
“You know perfectly well what Argelion is.”
“I should have thought so! But I recall nothing about a Potlatch! Why, that is a concept from Pacific Coast Indian tradition! Such a thing has no place in—”
“It is one of those things that we added to the world so long ago that we forgot it wasn’t your idea,” Richard said. “We can argue about it during dinner, if you like. Half of those guys at High Table are probably playing T’Rain in secret; they’ll enjoy hearing your thoughts on why Potlatches are bad. But for now, if you would just click on the friggin’ box…”
“All right, I have done so. And now new things!” The Don said this in the wondering tone that he always adopted when confronted by unexpected dynamism in a user interface. “‘One-quarter, one-half, three-quarters, all. Or enter an amount.’”
“Giving you options as to how much of your gold is going to Potlatch,” Richard explained. “Click ‘All.’”
This suggestion only triggered the same miserly tendencies that had caused the Anthron, until recently, to spare himself the expense of footwear. “No! All of that gold!? It’s just going to disappear?”
“From the game world,” Richard said. “Just please do it. If you’re unhappy with the results, I’ll get you more.”
The Don, looking scandalized and beleaguered, clicked ‘All’ and then hit the ‘Potlatch’ button. Then he sighed. “Easy come, easy go.”
Richard did not answer for a few moments, as he was busy logging out. “Okay,” he said, closing his laptop, and resuming the journey to the Bible stand. Next time he stayed here, he’d bring roller skates. “I’m going to need your credit card again.”
“Why!?” the Don exclaimed, as if this was exactly what he’d been worrying about.
“The same one you used to set up the account. Please.”
By the time Richard got over there, D-squared had worried the card out of what looked like Queen Anne’s wallet and handed it over. Richard flipped the card onto its face, pulled out his phone, set it on Speaker, and then dialed the customer service number printed on its back.
A lovely British voice came on, introducing them to the root of a branching tree of automated service options. Richard navigated to “Check recent transactions” and then punched in D-squared’s credit card number.
The most recent transaction, according to this disembodied robot on the other end of the line, was a credit in the amount of ￡842.69, time-stamped about five minutes ago.
“I guess you owe me a drink,” Richard said to the openmouthed and bulging-eyed face of the Don, “because you are now eight hundred quid—you call them ‘quid,’ right?—richer. Thanks to that little escapade.”
“That was the Potlatch?”
“Yes. Money disappears from T’Rain, as a burnt offering to Argelion. It never comes back. But that’s just a cover story that we have set up to enable players to extract hard currency.”
“I see!”