These meetings tended to start out with confident PowerPoint presentations and gradually trail off into quasi-philosophical management-speak aphorisms, more and more eyes turning to Richard as if to say, Please O please help us. Because Corporation 9592, at bottom, didn’t make anything in the way that a steel mill did. And it didn’t even really sell anything in the sense that, say, Amazon.com did. It just extracted cash flow from the players’ desire to own virtual goods that would confer status on their fictional characters as they ran around T’Rain acting out greater or lesser parts in a story. And they all suspected, though they couldn’t really prove, that a good story was as foundational to that business as, say, a blast furnace was to a steel mill. But you could slap a white hard hat onto an investor and take him into the plant and let him verify that the blast furnace was still there. Whereas a fantasy world was—well—a fantasy world. This had not prevented a lot of investors from entrusting many steel mills’ worth of capital to the board of directors of Corporation 9592 and the CEO they had hired to look after the business. And in normal times, it made money and everyone was happy, probably because they weren’t thinking about this potentially troublesome fantasy-world-based aspect of the business. But now they were thinking about it quite hard, and the more they thought about it, the more troubled they became. Corporation 9592 seemed to be undergoing an ontogenical retroversion to something like a start-up company. Richard was the only link back to that phase of the company’s development, the only one who could think and function in that environment. The rabid dog they kept locked in the basement. Most of the time.
Anyway, now Richard was on the plane over eastern Montana. Pluto was sitting across the aisle in a backward-facing seat, regarding the eastern foothills of the Rockies like a plumber gazing into a torn-open wall. Not that Pluto could really be of much direct use when it came to story issues. But it comforted Richard to have a God of Olympus on the plane with him. Pluto was a reminder that there were more elemental principles even than whatever it was Devin Skraelin did for a living. Pluto tended to view all Narrative Dynamics as nothing more than benign growths on his work, kind of like those microbes embedded on Martian meteorites. And indeed Richard supposed that, if it came down to that, Pluto could probably summon up a planetary catastrophe that would eradicate all life and history on T’Rain’s surface, and then start over again. But he would have a hard time sliding that one by the board of directors.
Enough of this woolgathering. He forced himself to look back down at the Devin Skraelin novel open on his lap.
Gnawed to a perilous weakness by the ravening flames, the drawbridge juddered under the footfalls of the massive Kar’doq. Its clenching talons pierced the carbonized wood of the failing timbers like nails driven into cheese. Peering down through a swirling nimbus of smoke, dyed all the lurid hues of Al’kazian silk by the particolored tongues of eldritch fire that lapped all around, its thin lips drew back to expose a silvery rictus of gibbering fangs. Staggered by the heat, which blasted his flesh like that of a swordsmith’s forge, Lord Kandador—knowing that his loyal guardsmen and guardswomen suffered yet worse agony—yet knowing that they would uncomplainingly go to their deaths before showing even the smallest hint of fear—gave the order to fall back. No sooner had the command escaped his parched throat than his young herald, Galtimorn, raised the glittering Horn of Iphtar to his cracked and bleeding lips and began to sound the melancholy tocsin of retreat. A few notes rang forth above the din of battle, then faltered, and Lord Kandador looked down to see Galtimorn crumpling to the smoking planks like a marionette with its strings cut, a stubby black iron arrow projecting obscenely from his chest. Had his guardsmen and guardswomen heard the signal? A sudden drawing-back, felt, rather than seen, suggested that they had. Transferring the full weight of his double-handed sword Glamnir to his right hand, Kandador reached down and in a single mighty gesture heaved the stricken young herald up onto his back. “To the keep!” he bellowed; and turning toward a phantom that had suddenly loomed in the corner of his eye, severed a Wraq’s bestial head from its gristly neck with a casual-seeming flick of the hungry blade.
This (Volume 11 of T’Rain Origins: Chronicles of the Sundered: The Forsaken Magicks), and the many others like it, had to be understood as Devin’s implementation of a general world mythos that had been drawn up on the back of a napkin, as it were, by Don Donald after a five-hour lunch, heavy on liquids, with Richard and Pluto, way back in what Richard now thought of as the good old days of the company.
The original plan had been that it was just going to be Richard and D-squared getting to know each other, serious meetings to happen later. But D-squared had ended up going from zero to seven hundred miles an hour in two pints. Richard ought to have foreseen this. But he’d had no idea, in those days, how guys like Don Donald and Devin Skraelin actually worked. He had guessed that they must be kind of like engineers, meaning that you had to have lots of meetings with them and explain the problem in PowerPoint presentations and get preliminary scoping meetings and contractual hoo-ha out of the way before they would actually begin to ply their trade per se.
Richard picked Don Donald up at Sea-Tac and drove him to his downtown hotel, assuming he’d want to crash for at least a day to recover from jet lag and whatnot, but he ended up leaving his Land Cruiser at valet parking and stepping into the hotel restaurant with his guest for “a bite,” which, after D-squared noticed the row of tap handles projecting above the bar, improved to “a pint,” during which Richard basically explained the entire premise of the game. This led to a second pint during which Don Donald, showing zero symptoms of jet lag or intoxication, achieved missile lock on what he had identified as the central matter of interest, namely Pluto’s terrain-generating code, and plunged into that topic so deeply that Richard had been obliged to begin making phone calls to Pluto and eventually sent a taxi around to collect him. Pint number 3 was all about getting to know Pluto (who drank club soda). After a pause for a trip to what D-squared identified as “the W. C.—it is an abbreviation for water closet—the toilet, if you please,” he devoted pint numbers 4 and 5 to disgorging an entire cosmogonical schema that he had either just made up or been carrying around in his hip pocket in case someone asked for one.