He was talking, of course, about palettes.
Until the week before Christmas, it would have been quite difficult for Zula’s and Wallace’s characters to do anything together in T’Rain, because hers were Good and his was Evil. Hers would not have been able to travel very far into Evil territory, or his into Good. They could have met up in some wilderness area or war zone, but that would not have helped them on this mission, since the western Torgai Foothills were an island of firmly Evil territory most easily approached from Good zones to the west.
But then, as millions of students had gone on Christmas break and found themselves with vast amounts of free time for playing T’Rain, the War of Realignment had been launched. This had been carefully prepared, for months in advance, by parties still unknown. It basically consisted of a hitherto unidentified group, consisting of both Good and Evil characters, launching a well-laid blitzkrieg against a different group, also mixed Good/Evil, that wasn’t even aware it was a group until the hammer fell on them. The aggressors had been dubbed, by Richard Forthrast, the Forces of Brightness. The victims of the attack were the Earthtone Coalition. These terms, initially used only for internal memos in Corporation 9592, had leaked out into the player community and were now being printed on T-shirts.
Wallace’s character was identifiable from a thousand yards away as belonging to the Earthtone Coalition. Zula’s first character—the one on the left—was also Earthtone. Her other character was markedly Brighter. She had created it on Christmas Eve when it had become obvious that large parts of the world of T’Rain were being rendered inaccessible to her Earthtone character because of the huge advances being made on all fronts by the numerically superior legions of the Forces of Brightness. In consequence, her Bright character—being newer—was much weaker. How much weaker was a matter of interpretation. In a radical break with role-playing game tradition, T’Rain did not use numerical levels to indicate the power of its characters; rather, it used Aura, which was a three-part score calculated from a number of statistics including the character’s rank in its vassal network, the size and overall power of that network, the amount of experience it had racked up, the number of things it knew how to do, and the quality of its equipment. As a character’s Aura expanded it acquired certain perks, but never in a wholly predictable way.
The world that Pluto’s software had created was almost exactly the same size as Earth, which meant that traveling around it using thematically appropriate (i.e., medieval) forms of transportation required a lot of time. In theory that might have been fixable by messing around with the very definition of time itself; one could imagine, for example, jump-cutting from the beginning of a three-month sea voyage to its end. This was fine in single-player games but totally unworkable in a multiplayer setting. The progress of time in T’Rain had been locked down to that of the real world.
Pluto’s solution had been to computer-generate a system of ley lines that crisscrossed the world with density comparable to that of the New York City subway system. This had been used as the basis of a teleportation system that worked by routing characters to intersections of ley lines. The number of lines and intersections was incredibly colossal and made far more complex by the fact that certain lines could only be accessed by certain types of characters. No one could really use the system without the aid of software that kept track of everything and provided suggestions on how to get from point A to point B.
And so with a few moments’ work, Zula and Wallace were able to teleport their characters to a city in the flatlands below the Torgai Foothills. Wallace’s character went to a moneychanger and acquired a thousand gold pieces, which would show up as a $73 charge on Wallace’s credit card. From there they teleported to the closest ley line intersection that they could find to the coordinates specified in the REAMDE ransom note, which, from there, would be a fifteen-minute ride on the swift mounts that both of them owned.
The ley line intersection point was marked by a simple cairn. This shimmered into view on both of their screens. Zula turned her character (a K’Shetriae mage) until she saw Wallace’s T’Kesh standing about a hundred feet away (the teleportation process involved some positional error).
The most notable feature of the landscape was that it was littered—no, paved—with corpses in varying stages of decomposition.
A boulder, about the size of an exercise ball, plunged out of the sky and struck the ground nearby. Since meteorites were no more common in T’Rain than they were on Earth, Zula suspected some artificial cause. Turning toward the nearest of the Torgai Foothills, a small peak a couple of hundred meters distant, she saw a battery of three trebuchets, one of which was being reloaded. The other two were just in the act of firing. Their dangling weights and hurling slings seemed ungainly, chaotic, and unlikely to work. But they did a fine job of hurling two additional boulders in her direction. Zula had to dodge one. Not far away was an outcropping of stone that looked like it might provide shelter. She ran to it and immediately came under fire from a squadron of horse archers hidden in tall grass nearby. She invoked some spells that should have protected her from the barrage of arrows, but one of them scored a lucky hit and killed her. Her character disappeared from the screen and went to Limbo.
Zula turned her head to see how Wallace was faring. Not much better. He was pinned under a boulder and had been surrounded by another squadron of horse archers, riding around him in a ring, firing inward. His health was low and dropping fast. “Don’t let yourself get captured,” she warned him. “I know,” he said, and clicked an icon on his screen, helpfully labeled FALL ON YOUR SWORD.