Chapter 12: Chapter 12. Scum and Villainy

Pellegrine listened as the Professor explained the mission to the new players. Barely a week ago, the release had occurred. The release seemed to mean an enormous number of powerful and incredibly stupid strangers had shown up in the week since.

They had zero manners, but each one of them had a fully-activated control band on their left wrist. There were a few crafters, but most of them were warriors or mages or other, more dangerous and often unknown classes. The guard had let people know in no uncertain terms that banded strangers, mostly humans, would be appearing at the node or in the graveyards, and to treat them as friendly strangers, not as the idiots they acted like.

The guard had already had to punish a few that had shown even more rude idiocy than the rest, trying to rob merchants as if living in a wizard town wouldn’t afford them access to magical defenses. In general, the jails couldn’t keep them, and torturing would cause them to return to the node magically. They weren’t even capable of being permanently killed, but levying a magically-reinforced fine against them worked quite well.

Some of the dumber ones had already built up enough debt that even as adventurers they would have the curse hanging over their heads and sucking up half their resources for a very long time. The ones that were the worst were the smart ones, though… They quickly scattered and were able to find their way into the underworld quite easily, where their enhanced power and utter disregard for the fates of locals probably won them positions and quests in a hurry.

Two of the new idiots had even had the sheer audacity to try to rob an alchemist. He overheard their arguments when they reappeared, naked, in the graveyard. Didn’t they know that to be a good enough alchemist to open your own shop, you were almost guaranteed to have maxed a number of resistances including poison immunity? He had yet to meet an alchemist that lived long enough to work with poisons that were less than rank 12.

They had actually tried to rob Master Verais, in the shop underneath the apartment Pellegrine called home. A simple inspect would have revealed that the coins they purloined from beneath the counter were simple kenned fakes that had been dipped in a nasty blend of toxins, and had shared out the loot with each other and tried to spend it. Everyone knew Verais’ poisoned coin and refused to touch them, and the robbers were quickly apprehended by the guard, who refused to touch them, just throwing ropes from a distance and then dumping them into the sewers to be food for the slimes.

Apparently, they were upset enough to complain to the ‘customer service' whatever that was, when all of their limbs rotted off and then they were consumed by a slime while the other, longer-lasting toxins got to work, enhancing their ability to feel pain and a lot of other effects.

Stupid. Not just ignorant, that was to be expected. A lot of these ‘adventurers’ were genuinely shocked when trying to rape a local girl resulted in serious damage to their genitals or getting beaten to death… like it couldn’t happen to them.

Of course, the red light district was gleefully separating the newbies from the money they were earning killing rats or slimes, and occasionally even goblins, in the sewers. Both they and the bathhouses were doing a brisk business, and if one of the adventurers occasionally forgot to save enough money for the temples to cure one of the little afflictions they may have picked up, well, maybe it would clear up when they ‘respawned’. Maybe.

Ironically, the red lantern district was cleaner than ever. Some girls that would be barely noticed plying their trade under normal circumstances were doing a brisk business with the newcomers and could afford to get their own problems taken care of at the temple with the sudden influx of cash, and the newcomers were ignorant enough of local traditional prices that the whores were starting to make as much as a tradesman or craftsman, if not a merchant.

It was injecting new money into the local economy, which the wizard’s circle had expected and were eagerly lapping up along with the temples and training grounds. It was like half of the new adventurers had never seen a cooch before. Of course, they were very careful to turn away the seeming adults that had ‘age restricted’ when identified. Having a ‘child molester’ tag bright and red in your identity that penetrated even epic obfuscation and disguise abilities was a very quick trip to the graveyard, and locals didn’t just reappear naked, or in the case of juveniles, clad in only a weird grey outfit that covered most of their torso and vitals.

The age-restricted ones were also prohibited from leaving the Rhydian forests, which was good because outside of the city and forest, the number of care people gave to identify tags vanished.

Generally, trainers would charge some ridiculously low price for basic training in, say, swordsmanship or armor use, and then gradually raise their prices far beyond extortionate as the newly-minted adventurers got used to their new abilities. Dozens of gold for about twenty minutes of work helping an ‘apprentice’ break through to ‘journeyman’ shield use. The mage’s guild was doing the same thing with cantrips, although they somehow justified charging even more for basic rank 1 spell instructions than the trainers did.

All you really needed to hang up your hat as a trainer was at least journeyman-competent training with a weapon or skill, and you could rake in the stupid by the handful. Most children with physical affinity were at least that level before they were even allowed to join the guard, and only the fact that the guard was getting bonuses to dissuade the stupid kept them from jumping ship to join the money train.

A few, very few of the new adventurers were very, very canny. The guard and army had figured out decades ago that most of the ‘quick trick’ maneuvers were easy to acquire and were worth exactly what you paid for them, almost nothing. They were predictable, flashy, and burned inordinate amounts of stamina or mana. But a few of the newbies were on the training fields practicing real skills with new gear that they had acquired fighting in the sewers without training. Since skill gains were based on growth and performing new actions, they were growing in power quickly and unlocking passives and abilities that could someday make them a real threat.

The guy that was talking to the professor was one of the worst, though. Apparently, some of the new ‘players’ had a great deal of money or power from wherever they came from via the node. He already had masterwork plate mail and was enormous. Somehow, some of them just started better off than others, with huge reserves of money and access to rare or unknown classes like, ironically enough, chronomancer. He was doing a side business as a trainer, which was raking in the dough, as he had purposefully made himself difficult to find.

Most Chronomancers tried to use their ability to do something stupid, and he’d actually heard one fellow bitterly complaining about how the class was ‘account suicide’. Apparently, Paradox hit hard enough that it could actually destroy the entire basis of a newcomer, forcing them to restart and choose something else.

He snickered. By the time the novices approached him for apprentice training and jumped through the hoops he had set up, they were already both canny and desperate. He could charge huge amounts that they would gleefully pay to help reduce their risks.

They didn’t have his hard-won abilities, so it was unlikely that he would be replaced, but the fact that they could somehow survive a paradox crash, even if it required returning to ground zero, made him horribly envious… and he charged them for it.

This guy’s class was something called a ‘sensual overlord’. The odd thing about players was that for advanced magical senses like his, if not identify, they appeared more like magical constructs than real people. In addition, the wealthy ones that brought allies with them, the allies were even more construct-like.

This guy clearly had some kind of social bonding ability, he was surrounded by women. He was a handsome, muscular, and huge human. The Wood elf with him was a construct and just kept looking at him adoringly. Some humans created magical sex dolls like that when they had such an appalling personality that no real people could tolerate them. In addition, he had some kind of bond with a small girl, Mentheen, it looked like. She was dressed in a red silken gown in the style of the southern empires, with large printed flowers and cranes, called a ‘kimono’.

He had tried to investigate her with improved magic sight, but she had glanced at him quickly and just smiled. No information, so she was either a powerful illusionist or had some kind of artifact to prevent inspection. What really made him sick, though, was that both of them had bonds leading to the big guy’s band that were extraordinarily similar to tamed beast bonds… these ladies were not beasts, which meant they had to be slaves. Slaves with their personalities completely subsumed by the bond, worse than a collar and a whip.

The third girl was not immediately recognizable as a girl. He could detect the hints of a bond, but she probably had a strong will and did not recognize what was happening. She was a dwarf, covered in ill-fitting bronze plate and a badly mismatched helmet. Her hammer was in good condition, but he had no idea if her gear was normal for a female dwarf… in all his centuries, he had never seen a female dwarf, since they were usually protected in strongholds and never left.

The professor continued, “Sindaenaway is built on a major naturally-occurring magical node, which is why it is the heart of the mage’s guild.”

Fecking idiot gnome. Too old. Probably alive since they were chased to this world, which meant he honestly, like most of the mage’s guilds, believed that ‘naturally occurring magical nodes’ were a thing. On this world, Mana seeped from Chaos gates, exclusively, when there was something on top of them that channeled their energy into mana. In the old world there were ‘magical nodes’, but that was only because, up until the sky elf emigration, chaos gate spawns were locked down by mages almost as soon as they erupted. Except for once.

Emigration. What a lovely word for getting chased here with our tails between our legs. He thought.

Pellegrine was not technically a chronomancer, that was just the title the band had assigned because he had the skills to fake it. On a world with a lot of Chaos gates, like Antowyn, there was enough Chaos that the occasional Paradox ripple could be smoothed out if you knew how.

On Earth, when he visited, there hadn’t been a real Chaos spawn since the event of 1908, and before that, it had been incredibly rare, a minor eruption twice a century or so. The amount of Chaos in the air was incredibly low, far too low for ready conversion into mana or anything else.

That was probably why they had so many channels. Order, without Chaos, couldn’t support anything… not magic, not change, not even life. All of Earth’s channels probably were the only thing keeping their entire world from expiring, as they altered the tiny amounts of chaos into usable life energy.

He wasn’t going to tell Professor Bartholemew Gaslightopper that there were more than a few other creatures on Earth gifted with channeling. They were rare, indescribably powerful, and they would take offense at being gathered up for Bart’s experiments, resulting in one dead not-chronomancer.

Something had happened long ago on Earth that sealed up the extra energy in that part of the cosmos. Some incredibly powerful wall of order had been created, and it had protected and weakened the planet for almost five thousand years. The small research he had done had found stories couched in religious terms, and a lot of it referred to the one god and a ‘seal of Solomon’ whatever the hell that was. Not that the people of Earth didn’t have an explanation for the Seal, but there were about as many explanations as there were scholars interested in researching it.

The most powerful of the creatures had gone into hibernation, subsisting on the ambient chaos and their own channeling until the world returned to normal. Every once in a while one would quietly awake, realize just how much time had passed without the seal being broken, and then leave the dimension for better pastures elsewhere. Without much Chaos, the Paradox there was so strong it was almost a law of nature, and could even destroy them if they made too much of a stir.

When he’d been looking for channels, he’d actually found one of the creatures. An ancient wingless golden wyrm slumbered beneath China, large enough to wreck the entire city of Shanghai in a few minutes if it awoke or even rolled over for a bad dream. He took one look at the beautiful, slumbering monument, and said “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope!” abandoning it, and Shanghai, as quickly as possible.

The professor continued. “That’s the point of this quest. There is something else down there, detectable with magic, in the vicinity. Some kind of monster or possibly even a wizard of some sort that disappeared 3 days ago. My sensitive magical abilities detected it, it is not terribly dangerous, but the area down there has been soaking in magic for centuries. I suggest you take a full party.”

The Big man took a look around him at the group and grinned, “I AM a full party.” he declared. “And the quest just updated. It says difficulty 15 solo or ten for a group. Well, I am a group and we are rank 12. It should be no problem.”

Bart lowered his big nose slightly, “I am afraid I am going to have to insist that you take at least one fully accredited mage with you. Fortunately for you, I have one available. Pellegrine?”

“What the hell?” Pellegrine thought. “This dirtbag wants me to babysit some rank 12 adventurers into what is most likely a dungeon, chasing what?” He was thoughtful as he strode into the room.

“Pellegrine, I need you to assist this adventurer in finding and stopping whatever is going after the magic node beneath the city. As a level 12 sorcerer, I am sure you are more than capable of helping him retrieve whatever or whoever it is that is trying to subsume the city’s magic. Your usual rates apply, and I have it on good authority that this is one of your usual targets.”

“My usual rates? Are you sure?” he asked.

Gaslightopper nodded, “Yes. My scans have indicated that this may be what we need. Exactly what we need.”

The adventurer was grumbling about escort missions, glaring at the professor, and then whispering ‘Fucking EnPeeCee’ under his breath at a volume sensitive elven hearing had no problems making out.

He suddenly stopped, startled, touched his bracelet, and looked stricken. He glanced at Pellegrine and mumbled, “Sorry.”

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Was it possible AO had just punished him for saying something that he wasn’t supposed to? What was an EnPeeCee? Curious, Pellegrine nodded. This was likely to take at least a day, and rip a huge chunk out of his debt. “Very well.”

“Oh, Pellegrine?” Bart said as he strode towards the office’s exit.

He turned a little, “Yes?”

“If this is what we think it is, if it passes the test and you bring it back successfully, consider your debt canceled.”

What the hell did Bart think it was? A full channeler? Not very likely. Most likely, it was one of the many, many channeler bodies that got dropped into the sewer. Either it had turned undead, or it had been absorbed by a slime and activated as a minor talent. Either way, it would be likely useless, merely drawn towards whatever was shielding the Chaos gate by the power it was expelling.

Still, money was money. He carefully altered his obfuscate and went dormant to match the new party, as a twelfth-rank sorcerer, and temporarily lose some of his more advanced abilities and would not get any advancement while he was with the team. He nodded to the Professor. “Of course, sir. I will see that it is done.”

It’s not like he ever got any experience gains from the Professor’s missions anyway.

---

“Damned non…” Rik-Man-Enough stopped himself as he peered over the edge of a truly deep chasm of some sort, Bei-Ling’s hand on his chest as he was just about to step over the ledge.

“That’s not probably the best course of action, Rik. Unless you are wanting to drop down a level and the entire… 500 feet.”

Rik gulped, and then sighed. “Sorry, I just friggin’ hate escort missions. I mean, he’s been alright so far, but all we have dealt with have been trash mobs like goblins and rats and stuff. And now I have to scale a cliff. I was hoping to skip this part and head right into the fighting.”

Rik was a gamer and knew damned well that an easy entrance was deceptive. Yard trash was yard trash. The goblins had had maybe a couple of coppers between them, and he’d already done the rat tail quests dozens of times when he was a newb… the day before yesterday. The Goblins were even weaker than the ones on the surface, although the one with the magical junk armor had been a bit more fun and given just a hint of experience. He should have come down there at level 6.

Once they got down the cliff, if there wasn’t some sort of awful rockfall scripted event or a host of traps or giant spiders, at the bottom, it was absolutely guaranteed to be wall-to-wall elites, some sort of boss, or a horde of evil Chuckies of some kind. Pellegrine was going to run off like idiot escort targets always do, try to fight or something, and get his stupid NPC ass killed.

No mistake. This game blew every other VR experience completely out of the water. His moms had gotten him advanced access, and even signed the age waiver without a protest. Not a big deal, since at 17 he’d already had 3 live girlfriends and dozens of VR affairs, but the sex here… it felt real. Better than real. Better than even the electrostim cafes and virtual datazones. Every single part felt real, even the tastes of all kinds and the way this gigantic, well-endowed, and hugely muscular body felt.

He hadn’t logged off for a bathroom and neutro break yet, and at 12-to-1 he wouldn’t have to again for...two more days. He wished he could just stay awake the whole time, but the girls needed to sleep, even if they were NPCs, and folks who stayed awake for four days in the game, even though their bodies burnt off fatigue like they were asleep, their minds started doing weird things. He’d heard about the beta tester who had stayed awake for the entire 24 hours he was plugged in, and came out looney and trying to kill and eat people in the passageways for their loot and experience.

After that, Antowyn Online engaged safety protocols. Lots of safety protocols that encouraged people to feel tired after 18 hours awake in-game. There were workarounds, of course, but all of those required effort. No more than 50% of in-game pain protocols without being in full-dive with a doctor monitoring, and even that only allowed up to 75% of the pain. Hostile mind control was altered to ‘avatar control’ where you got to log out or sit in ‘spectator mode’ while you watched what your avatar did from a 3^rd person perspective until the spell expired or your character died.

And each of those safety protocols was probably marked by one or more deaths by a Beta tester. That was okay, though, because they were all basics and weren’t real people and didn’t feel pain like real people did, or they wouldn’t live in the crates.

Mom Krista was smart. If this thing took off like she thought it would, they could start rounding up the basics and putting them to work, since they wouldn’t work without being forced into it. AO was looking at a huge influx of mandatories, with potentially enormous profits to be made from bit mining for crypto or if this worked as well as AO hoped, actual economic transfers between AO and real-world crypto.

Besides, basics didn’t contribute in any other way, that was why they were on basic. Huge taxes poured downhill to the crates, a constant stream of food and medical supplies, and it was about time they sent something back up other than organ donors and criminals.

He took a look at Shiana, the elven archer that had been with him as his first harem member during the tutorial. She was… definitely not a real person. Her reactions were scripted, and she often burst out with advertisements or repeated rehearsed phrases. She was incredibly fun in bed, but he usually had to order her not to say anything while they were doing it or he’d get kicked out of the mood.

Bei-ling, though… a few years ago all the nursing homes and corpsicle shacks had been emptied while their brains had been ‘repurposed’ for data handling. Damned good idea, too. Mae Bei-Ling only occasionally acted like an NPC, and he wondered if she was being controlled by the brain of an old woman or some frozen person that had been thawed and installed. They were dead and had no rights, but Bei-Ling was active, creative, and totally on the subject in bed with him, and even sometimes coaxed better responses out of Shiana.

The two of them would never have even noticed his existence outside unless they were brought fresh from the crates and impressed, and even then they’d probably be infected with the millions of diseases that raced regularly through the crates and helped keep the leech population down. Not that a girl from the crates would ever look that good.

Here, there were the occasional diseases, but for only a few gold you could get everything cured in a jiffy at a local temple. Well, almost anything, but despite rumors, he hadn’t met a vampire or werewolf yet, although he HAD met a half-leopard slave called a ‘change child’ at one of the more… unusual brothels

Cassie was weird. Apparently, dwarven girls were something of a rarity. He half-expected some sort of beard, but she was a lot like other redhead girls, just… squashed, like she was in a funhouse mirror. Cute, but he was more interested in the novelty of adding her to his harem instead of the fucking. Of course, she was cute enough that eventually he’d bone her like a catfish, but for right now the bond was weak, and he’d been warned about pushing things too quickly with NPCs.

Cassie seemed to be in some sort of a trance, staring at the far wall of the cavern, on the other side of the mighty crevasse.

“What is it, Cassie?” he asked politely. All part of the game. He had two bonds and was working on a third, but his enhanced charisma and level in Sensual Overlord allowed him up to 5 harem members, two combat pets, and a mount. He was specialized and had no extra intelligence, dexterity, or wisdom, but that’s what his harem was for. He had 26 strength, 24 Health, and 28 Charisma… a perfect beastmaster build that was even more effective as an Overlord. Everyone that had ever played an MMO knew that rounded stats were for losers. Winners minimaxed their best features and relied on them.

He also had blocking and plate mail, and the biggest goddamned sword on the planet. Who needs to dance around dodging when any incoming attack was more likely to chop itself in half on your weapon than hurt you? It also let his girls hide behind the mighty overlord while they cast and shot arrows, and Cassie was exactly the right height for him to use her mouth… eventually. Right now, though, she was the perfect height to help protect against low attacks, the only thing close to a weakness he had.

“Copper,” she said “Copper, and Silver, and… gods I smell so much metal in this cavern… it’s like heaven for a dwarf.”

“Is it valuable?” Rik asked.

Cassie nodded, “Yes, it has minimal inclusions, and even the matrix is surrounded by precious and semiprecious gems, clean as a baby’s bottom.”

Rik coughed a little, “Babies bottoms aren’t…” and then remembered that Cassie never used euphemisms right. “So it’s worth a lot?”

“Yes, it’s worth a lot. It’s worth an awful lot, to anyone who can get a mining team down here, but it’s pretty deep. The sewers were probably completed, and it’s way too far from the sewer for a dwarf to detect. Hell, if the sewer wall hadn’t gotten knocked out during the earthlord attack last year, we couldn’t have come this way and I would have missed it, and there’s not much that earth sense misses.”

“I am not a miner, I don’t even think I could stand trying to run a mine down here. Is there some way we can make money from it?” Rik asked.

Cassie nodded, “You better believe it. Long-form, we hire from Silverheart, let them know, they cut a deal with the city, and we get a finder’s fee. Short form, we find some darks, they send a kobold work team, we get a much BIGGER slice of the cake, kill them when they try to short-shaft us and walk away rich while maybe a quarter of Sindaenway collapses into a giant sinkhole. The plus side, of course, is that a quarter of Sindaenaway plunges into a sinkhole, the downside is, most of that quarter is already abandoned and we are unlikely to drop the palace and mage’s guild at the same time.”

Rik interpreted that in his head. “I take it you don’t like Sindanaway.”

Cassie shrugged, “It’s not a matter of not liking it, it’s a matter of trying to find anything I don’t hate about it. It’s a skive of hum and errr… Hilary. The best part of the city is its sewers, which look like old dwarven work. I’d be happy if they got some fresh air, by razing the entire city above them.”

Pellegrine, who was sitting on the edge of the cliff with his legs dangling over, gave Cassie a thumbs-up sign. “Yeah, it’s like Nektuso took a shit, and forgot about it until the maggots had already abandoned it after it dried out.”

“Pellegrine, do we have to go down the cliff?”

Pellegrine nodded, a grin on his face. “You betcha.” and started hopping down the incline, lightly bouncing from rock to rock, followed by Shiana, who went down the same way after he had set her on ‘guard’ for the escort.

Cassie shrugged and started playing out a line as she hammered pitons almost casually on her way down. She was a dwarf, and dwarves looked at underground cliffs like kids looked at jungle gyms. After a moment, Mae Bei-Ling opened her robes wide and used them to start slowly spiraling her way downwards in a glide.

“Dammit,” Rik grumbled. “Every stupid time.” He started trying to pick his way down the cliff steadying himself, badly, with Cassie’s rope. If climbing around was a normal occurrence, he might have to re-think some of his stat loading.

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