AIN SOPH, Part 4

Episode 4

Andy didn’t file reports and design new games while he had Duke standing alone in a city square. White Knights were all live players, names written in green above their heads, accompanied by, ‘Imperial Soldiers,’ with only that name written in NPC blue. Hovering miles above them was a Sci-Fi pilot named Grimlock, piloting a ship named Grimlox, waiting the approach of any Sci-Fi player willing to fly around the Spidrons and violate Fantasy atmosphere. Andy had his personal laptop computer hacked into the SpectraCom network, playing TAO Sci-Fi.  This illegal job paid nearly as much as Andy’s primary employment, for the exact same workload. While Andy was sloughing off Fantasy to slough off Sci-Fi, then he found time to file his reports and return emails.

Circumventing the swarm was difficult, because the Spidrons had multiplied enough to fill that entire top-to-bottom plane of the TAO universe, and there was nothing worth seeing for hundreds of game hours and quite a few real hours as well. That didn’t stop some players from trying to find the nearly-impossible-to-find TAO Fantasy world. Being slain by a Piscean had become a status symbol in some growing circles. Andy used the Grimlox to try and prevent that. Should any get past his relatively low-level character, Duke was a brutal second step that none had circumvented yet.

Andy had written and arranged the code that shaped the hills, valleys, forests, and oceans with the careful hands of a potter. Some of the gunships available to even low-level players could do permanent damage to a landscape. Andy found most Sci-Fi players to be spray-and-pray shooters that took out everything around them to destroy the smallest targets. For this, Andy didn’t mind risking his career to brutalize the PC of some fat, mouth-breathing dwarf that hasn’t showered or shaved in a week or more, but can get away with it because he wouldn’t leave his mother’s basement until the next convention.

Even though Sci Fi characters were not allowed on the TAO Fantasy worlds, they legally could be murdered only by White Knights. The Piscean Knights would organize raiding parties to meet invading ships and earn big experience from dispatching the players. By game policy, White Knights were required to kill offending Fantasy players as well. When Andy saw a large group descending on Ground Zero, he would hold back and delay other White Knights with inept plans to intercept. Duke could not arrive on the scene of a battle until it was over. By rule of the order, the Piscean Knights sacrificed themselves to the Mods so the unknowing members of the raiding party could escape with the experience they earned. Duke ensured they could be killed mercifully, in a manner that allowed their players to collect the valuables later.

Episode 5