MMORPG: How a Computer Game Becomes Deadly Serious (33 page)

“Now we know why there were only seven members of the Hammer of Grimstone online yesterday,” he said.

~~~

Chapter XXVIII

The
landscape was covered with snow. He cautiously moved up the slope, aware that if he made a misstep, he could easily tumble to his death. Each footstep was accompanied by a loud crunch as it left an imprint in the snow.

Drimm didn’t look back. In fact, he wasn’t concentrating all that hard. His mind was occupied by the loss of three of the members of their group. Of course, he had known beforehand that it was going to happen. And he had known all the time that it
could
happen; he had known only for a week that it was actually
going
to happen. It could have been him, couldn’t it?

His mind kept returning to the three men who were dead now. They had been through a lot together. Their group had trained for many weeks in Africa, Asia, and even in Europe, and they had learned how to work together and how to depend on each other. He wondered again how each of them had received the news that they were selected to sacrifice themselves, and how they had felt in those last moments, just before they were committed, just before the point of no return. Involuntarily, he shivered. He, too, had pledged his life to the cause and to their leader. If he was asked to, he would be honor bound to sacrifice himself without hesitation.

Drimm reached a stretch of flat surface on the mountainside at a dizzying altitude. He turned around for a look at the broad colorless expanse of the Dragonblight. The land was far more than just a blur of featureless white with some dark patches. One of the few things that could be distinguished was the massive Wyrmrest Temple, rising majestically out of the frozen soil. On the foot of the mountains he had just climbed, the Mirror of Dawn was discernable. The surface of hard deep blue ice on this frozen lake had somehow remained unblemished by the snow cover that blanketed the land mass of the Dragonblight. Only the bones of a gigantic dragon carcass marred its ice cold perfection. In the far distance, he could even make out the mountains on the other side of the zone that separated Dragonblight from Icecrown.

Again, thoughts of his fallen comrades invaded his mind. He wondered what they would have thought of Cataclysm. He knew how much Caliburr had looked forward to the new expansion. With a sigh, he forced the melancholic thoughts out of his head. One of the things he had learned in the past years was how useless it was to dwell on issues that couldn’t be changed.

He had come here to find some rest in his head before he continued the frenzy of questing and leveling again, and, more important, before they started the last few days of the preparations for their next mission. It was going to be their final act in Holland, the crown on their work here.

He couldn’t find his much needed rest in the other parts of WoW
,
now that Cataclysm had turned everything upside-down. There was something unsettling about having the world changed so much. The familiarity of the game, and the knowledge that he was always in control, had become an anchor is his life. As Northrend was the only Azerothian continent unchanged by Cataclysm, he had come here to think.

A giant Magnataur was just coming out of a large cave in the mountainside and passed right below the ridge on which Drimm was perched. From his vantage point, Drimm could see most of the inside of the cave. A cozy fire was burning, and in its illumination he could see some furnishings and even some decorations on the rock wall. Dregmar Runebrand obviously lived in some comfort.

He knew this mob, of course. Killing it was part of a quest chain that ran out of Wyrmrest temple. It normally took a group of three people to bring the elite Magnataur down. Even though the creature, half human, half beast, had over a hundred thousand hitpoints, he could easily kill it if he wanted to. He watched Runebrand as he ambled up a slight rise and walked right up to the point where the abyss beckoned. Just like Drimm himself had done only minutes before, Runebrand took his time to gaze out over the Dragonblight.

He checked his watch. Pharad was late. His social window told him that the people they had been playing with yesterday, Gunslinger and Killermage, were online and somewhere in a place called Deepholm.

Strange that Gilead wasn’t online either. They had a clear appointment to rendez-vous at this time. It was unusual for any of them to fail to show up.

At that moment he heard the sound that told him that someone he knew had come online. He glanced at the bottom of his screen and felt a sudden tightening in his belly. He nodded to himself. Under the circumstances, and especially in his present mood, maybe this was to be expected. Without preamble, the newcomer invited him to a party. He accepted. It was just the two of them.

“Can you come to the Quel'Danil Lodge?” He was given an order: this was definitely not a polite question. He had met Jinn only three times before, always to receive instructions while Pharad was absent for some reason. He had often wondered about the true identity of this character. Who was this person, so obviously in their leader’s confidence? At some point he had suspected that Caliburr could be this force in the shadows. But Caliburr was dead now, so that guess was proven wrong in the most convincing way.

Drimm acknowledged the request, and the party was disbanded immediately. With a sigh, he took one last look at the landscape and used his hearthstone to leave.

Drimm prided himself on his bibliographical knowledge of World of Warcraft. Most players wouldn’t have known immediately what or where the Quel'Danil Lodge was. The lodge was one of at least twenty different areas in the Hinterlands, a quiet backwater and in turn only one of the many zones in the entire game. He knew immediately what and where it was. He fleetingly wondered how much this zone had been effected by Cataclysm.

Before Cataclysm, he would have had to use a flight master to get there. Now, he just summoned his own flying mount and flew northward from Undercity.

The Quel'Danil Lodge was an Alliance friendly place and therefore the objective of some Horde quest givers. It was exactly like what could be expected from a wildlife hunter’s lodge in the wilderness of Africa. It consisted of a main building at a small lake, with several smaller outbuildings where guests could sleep.

When Drimm arrived, the inhabitants of the lodge were already dead. The elven corpses were scattered all over the grounds and the inside of the main building. He entered and walked through the lodge until he emerged on the terrace at the back. He noticed Jinn immediately. He jumped down from the terrace and walked up to the Troll mage standing in the grass at the edge of the small lake.

“Here I am, as you requested.”

A trade window opened, and he received a document. He accepted it, without reading it first.

“Now you have your orders. P will contact you. Be careful. Something is amiss.”

With these words, Jinn started to cast a spell. A few seconds later, he disappeared, leaving Drimm alone at the edge of the silent lake in the wilderness. He sat with his feet in the water and started to read.

~~~

Chapter XXIX

“
I
just don’t get it,” Rebecca said when they finally got the message that Drimm had logged off. He had remained in the Hinterlands for over an hour. Now none of the Grimstones was online. “They were so eager to kick off with Cataclysm, and now they aren’t playing anymore.”

“Maybe they’re focusing on other priorities,” Robert said. “Like planning their next attack.”

“That could be. Have you considered how weird this all is?” She made Killermage sit on the ground and turned to him. “Do you realize that it’s most likely that some of the people we saw in Rotterdam, are dead now? And that they killed at least eighteen innocent people in the process?”

Robert nodded. “Imagine going to Rotterdam to buy the new expansion, knowing all the time that you won’t be playing it. Because you’re going to your death shortly. Voluntarily.”

Rebecca looked at the window and shivered. It was comfortably warm in the room, but outside the temperature had dropped and heavy rain beat on the glass of the window. She was sitting in the swivel chair at the desk, dressed in a simple white jersey and faded jeans.

“Not getting to play would be the least of my worries,” she replied. “I can’t place myself inside the mind of someone who would do something like that. Killing all those innocent people for some religious purpose? Letting myself be killed? You must be strange and warped to do such a thing.”

Robert nodded with a grimace. “Drimm was certainly acting strange as well. And he didn’t go to Undercity to visit the bank. He was out of there too soon. By far.”

They had followed the progress of the Tauren hunter through their social window and seen that he had left the underground city of the Undead almost immediately after arriving there. He had taken a flight to the Hinterlands and remained there for a long time.

“The Hinterlands is a strange place to go for a level eighty-two,” she confirmed. “There’s nothing to be done there, apart from examining the damage caused by Cataclysm. Why would he go there of all places, while he’s in the middle of leveling to eighty-five in brand new zones?”

Robert looked questioningly at her. “What should we do now?”

She frowned, then looked up with a tight smile. “We do what we did before. We switch to real world surveillance. Let’s activate the camera!”

She wheeled her chair over to the other computer, on which the software of the little camera was installed. The image of the other room didn’t come up at the tap of a key. Questioningly, Rebecca hit a few more keys.

“The power is off.” Robert had come to stand beside her. He pointed at a flickering yellow light at the base of the laptop computer.

“I can see that!” she snapped back. “Somehow,” she directed a sharp glance at him, “the power cable has become unplugged. So the computer went in power save mode.”

The computer whirred back to life, taking a minute to restore itself to the point where it had shut down. Their window onto Khalid’s room opened again.

They both froze at what they were seeing. Khalid was standing in the middle of the room, carrying an enormous backpack. He was looking around the place in a way that couldn’t be misunderstood. He was leaving. For good. They watched him finish his survey and step to the door. At the same time, the sound of the door opening and shutting reached their ears as well. They remained motionless until the heavy footsteps of their former neighbor had dwindled down the stairs.

Rebecca reacted first. She snatched the telephone and frantically looked up the number of Broerse. A snarl of frustration escaped her when she reached his voicemail. She dropped the device and turned back to her computer. She clicked a few times, then sagged back with a defeated expression. Robert looked at her uncomprehendingly. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Look for yourself,” she answered, pointing at the screen.

He moved over and looked. It took a few seconds before it sunk in what she meant. When he finally understood, he actually felt the blood drain from his face. He stared at Rebecca with blank eyes. The social window, which until now had always displayed the status and whereabouts of the Grimstones, was empty.

“How can this be?” he stammered. “Where have they gone?”

In answer, she reached over and clicked on the log to the left side of the bottom of the screen and scrolled up.

“There it is”, she said, tapping the monitor. “They all went at the same time.”

Friend removed because the character no longer exists
Robert read. He scrolled upward and saw the message repeated several times.

“What happened? Did they just delete their characters?”

Rebecca laughed at him. “Of course not, silly! I bet you a hundred to one that they moved them to another server.”

Seeing the blank look on his face, Rebecca elaborated, “Remember what I told you about the many different servers? They moved their characters to another server, just like I did with my mage and my rogue. I moved them to Sylvanas so I could be with you and the bad boys. You pay a little money, that’s all.”

With a slight nod, Robert signaled his understanding. His brain was working at lightning speed. “The question is, why would they have done that?” he said hesitantly. “Do you think they found out about our surveillance?”

She turned serious again. “Good question. It could be merely a precaution. Or maybe not. Still, we need to find them again.”

“How are we going to do that?”

She answered with her face already turned to the computer. “That depends on how thorough they’ve been.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. With a sigh, she suddenly slumped back. “Damn!” she exclaimed. “It’s as I feared. They also changed their names!”

Robert took the two steps that brought him behind her, so he could look over her shoulder. Rebecca had the Armory on the screen, the database in which every single WoW character over level ten could be found. She had searched for ‘Pharad,’ but the character wasn’t displayed.

“I already checked all the others. They’re not to be found.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means that they changed the names of the characters as well. Another service provided by Blizzard in exchange for a few dollars.”

Suddenly, she slammed her left fist on the table. “Damn, we’re forgetting something. Maybe he didn’t change his password. We could still hack into the account!”

Immediately, she brought up the login screen of WoW. She entered Khalid’s username and password and hit enter.