Trio of Sorcery (32 page)

His mind was racing so hard he drove on automatic; he didn't even realize he was at the garage until he found
himself turning into his usual parking space. As he climbed out of the car and looked around, a little dazedly, he saw by the scattered vehicles in the otherwise empty space that the rest of the team had been called in too.

It wasn't just instinct that took him to the conference room, it was the smell of fresh donuts and coffee. A very grim-faced Ell, eyes showing the lack of sleep, was presiding over both. The rest of his team were slumped into chairs around the table, fueling up.

“Good, that's the last of you,” Ell said with a nod to Tom. “Now…I hate to do this to you, but we are in a world of trouble here. So I need to know something and I need to know it now. Do you guys believe that I know what I'm talking about? Because if you don't…” She shook her head. “Let's just say I need absolute trust from you, because if you thought what I said before was crazy, you're going to send for the nut-wagon before I'm done now. And we don't have time for that. So. Anyone?”

She looked around the table. So did Tom. Kathy bit her lip. “Um…last night…the rest of us decided we were going to check the Wendigo out ourselves, on some of the other servers.” Kathy looked very pale. “It…it did things we never coded it to do. And…” Her voice faltered and died for a moment and she looked down at her hands. When she looked back up again, there was real fear in her eyes. “Let's just say we all compared notes and…whatever you say, I think we'd believe.”

Ell's lips twitched. “Scared you, did it? Good enough.
All right, here's the skinny. We have the worst possible scenario going. It's not a mythago. It's the real thing. It's intelligent and self-aware; it's learning more every second your servers are up because it can access whatever is on those servers. It knows very well it's not in the real world, and it wants out.” Again, she looked around the table. Tom noted that although Erik and Kathy looked shocked, no one looked as if they disagreed with Ellen's assessment. “I've been pounding away at the world book for the last couple hours, and I think I know how it happened. In Ojibwa myth, a human becomes a Wendigo when he resorts to cannibalism. So tell me something, Erik—what, exactly, did you code the Wendigo
from?
Did you make him from scratch or did you mod something that already existed?”

Erik looked as if he had swallowed something very sharp and painful. “I…I tested out the health and power absorbing powers first. I used an old avatar I already had rather than roll something up, I just revised him for a Boss Monster, went into the beta costume generator and the devs-only art to add the code for the new look and tested it on him, tested the powers the same way, the size-increasing business as he fed…”

Ell closed her eyes. “The game equivalent of a human getting into cannibalism. That'd do it, all right. If you have a cannibalistic avatar, you already have the Wendigo in concept, and that's how you guys invoked him. This”—she put her hand on the world book—“this was the equivalent
of a summoning spell. The only reason he's taken this long to figure out that where he found himself is not where he wants to be, is because he's stretched across all of your servers. He literally was scatterbrained until he learned how to talk to himself on the chat channel.”

“Oh, God,” Erik moaned.

“Look, you couldn't have known.” Ell was very quick to say that, for which Tom was grateful. But then she added, “Unfortunately, after looking through your world book, I figured out that it's only a matter of time before he gets what he wants.”

The shocked looks around the table, and the silence that met those words, were the only answer they could give her. Finally it was Tom who spoke. “I thought you said that magic could only affect little things—”

“I said it could only affect little things given the level of power that most magicians have access to. But belief is power, and you have thousands and thousands of gamers believing, somewhere inside themselves, in the Wendigo. I bet a percentage of them dream about fighting him every night. That belief, that power, is trickling into him as long as the servers are up.”

She tapped the world book. “The last thing he needs to transition—to manifest—in the real world, is in here too. You guys have a crafting system, and a game system that dumps out a lot of loot. The little descriptors define what that loot would be if it was in the real world, so each of these things is a kind of magical equivalent of the real
thing. Magic works on symbols and words. One of the things that makes me a techno-shaman is that I am good at figuring out how to make modern objects stand in for the ancient equivalents—and you've coded the ancient equivalents right here.

“Put them all together on a single avatar, in the right order, and bingo, you have a working spell. I know this because I've done it myself, to assemble a collection of objects that gave me the equivalent of what I would need to work a traditional magic spell.”

Tom blinked at her. “You mean, one that worked in the game?”

“Several, actually.” She nodded. “And I had another look at the snapshot of the Wendigo code that we took. He's doing the same thing. You guys managed, somehow, to create exactly the right objects for a manifestation spell. He needs two things: power, which he is getting, and certain objects, of which he has all but one or two. He's been stealing the objects he needs from the avatars he defeats, just like someone looting a body.”

Erik looked at her with his mouth open. “But—how?” he blurted. “He's a Boss Monster! He doesn't have loot slots…” Suddenly, he went white. “He does,” Erik said softly.

Ell nodded. “Because you coded him out of an old avatar and you forgot to delete the loot slots.”

“And when he fights people—”

“He can swap the ownership codes and take what he
needs from them.” She rubbed the side of her hand nervously. “The only reason he can't get this stuff for himself is that he
is
a Boss Monster, so he can't go on quests. He can only spawn in and hope to get what he needs off his enemies. He's not more than a couple of pieces away from having that manifestation spell. Luckily, the world book says those items are ultrarare. But the Wendigo is on
all
the servers, so the odds are he's going to find what he's missing sooner rather than later.”

The silence around the table felt like the silence when the boss comes in and tells you a project is canceled. Only more so. They looked at one another. The only noise was the air from the vents.

Erik looked hungover and had stubble. Kathy looked like she might have slept in her clothes. Tom knew what he looked like—just as bad. But the expression they all shared was pure fear.

“So what do we do?” Tom spoke for all of them.

“We could take those pieces of loot out of the game,” Kathy suggested.

But Ell shook her head. “There's more than one manifestation spell, and he'll just switch to another. Besides, unless it's crafted into something, loot doesn't go away, and someone could still have the piece on his avatar. You can't track down every player and ask to go through his backpack. But the thing about spells is that they are tricky things and liable to reverse on you. The one thing I need to know is this—can you slip something into the game
code, a change in the description of something, while the servers are still up?”

“Something like a description change? That doesn't affect game play and goes into a table?” Tom nodded. “Yeah. We don't like doing real-time patches and hot fixes, but it can be done.”

Ell took a long breath. “In that case, I have a plan. And I need all of you to help with it.”

The team was assembled, although Ell was the only one actually inhabiting the avatar. It wasn't Stevie the Elf this time, or at least, it wasn't the original Stevie. This had originally been what the devs called “a brick,” a character made more as a meat-shield than a damage-dealer. Stevie looked the same, still elfin and slim, with a sword as big as she was, but now she could absorb punishment. Lots of punishment.

They'd done some dev tweaking on it, of course. It didn't quite have the fast response of the light little fighter, but Ell could whack things out of the park with that broadsword. And it would be
Ell
doing the moves now, not Toby and his key mashing. She had full control, within the code limits of the game itself.

And she was practically on fire with real magic. She had defense spells up like nothing anyone in this game would ever see again (she hoped); plus spells for luck, to
skew the bits; spells for accuracy; and spells to increase her damage. If this had been in the real world, even with Toby's help, creating and maintaining all those spells would have left her as limp as overcooked linguine, but this wasn't the real world. In the game, she could keep this sort of thing up all day if she had to. She hoped she wouldn't have to.

Tom was on a Healer, a brown-robed, bearded Druid-type wielding a honking big wooden staff, with every long-distance fix-up power in the game. It was his job to stay out of the way and keep everyone from faceplanting. Kathy was on a big Nordic blonde in a fur bikini and a pair of shaggy boots, a light fighter like the original Stevie the Elf. Erik was on an emaciated, white-faced, black-clad, winged archer, standing back with Tom. Kathy and Erik would do the damage. Ell was there to keep the Wendigo's attention on her and hold it, like the red cape of the bullfighter.

They were about to run what Ell privately was thinking of as “Operation Briar Patch.” Which sounded harmless enough, and the consequences for everyone but her if this didn't work were fairly minimal.

For her…well, she honestly did not know. She'd never ridden an avatar before. If an animal was killed while you were riding it, if you were experienced—which she was—you could get out safely. But this was unexplored territory, and the machine operated on micromilliseconds, not human reaction time.

Of course none of them had the slightest idea that she was doing this, that her “character” was the real Ellen. They thought she was just playing an avatar, as they were.

On the plus side, avatars didn't really “die”; they went down to zero health and fell over and couldn't move unless a friend restored their health and “resurrected” them. They could also resurrect in a Healing Shrine, but that cost, and some people preferred to wait for as long as it took for a friend to come along.

If you were in a zone that allowed players to defeat other players, it was definitely a winner-take-all situation. Lose in PvP and the victor got to “loot the body.” That might be how the Wendigo was taking what it needed from the players it defeated—switching on the PvP code. Or it might simply be switching the ownership code of the objects, as she'd first surmised. She really hoped it was the second. If it could switch on PvP code, it could make things very uncomfortable and even more complicated for her and her team.

She wondered if the Wendigo really understood what it was doing and knew how to work the code, or if it was just a matter of “want-take,” with the code manipulation a combination of magic and instinct. She really, really hoped it was the latter. Because a Wendigo that actually knew how to manipulate code could go anywhere and do anything. It could lock down an entire secure facility building full of people, make sure they couldn't escape, and
feed at its leisure. Unrestricted by the game code it would grow, and grow…

The Ojibwa Wendigo was limited by the small numbers of people in the remote forests where it lurked. In the modern world…imagine it loose in New York City…

They waited for Tom to locate where it was now, because it was no longer despawning on its own. The only time it despawned now was when it got taken down by gaming clans.

“Got it,” Tom said in the little cartoon balloon that appeared over his head. But now, thanks to another spell, she could hear them too. He sounded like Dr. Stephen Hawking. It was a good thing the avatars couldn't giggle.

“Are you shutting the servers down now?” she asked. The world flickered a little as her avatar tried to do something it couldn't—laugh hysterically. She sounded like Stephen Hawking too.

“Roger,” Erik replied. “Mark's handling it himself. The first five-minute warning is going out on Emerald server now.”

One by one, the game servers were going to be shut down. As that happened, more and more of the Wendigo's “self” would consolidate on the servers that were still up, until, finally, this would be the only server left, and all of the Wendigo would be here.

That would be the most dangerous moment of all.
Every bit of its consciousness would be
here,
and it would be concentrating entirely on them. And they had something it wanted very, very badly.

They had the last two pieces of loot that would allow it to manifest.