Sturm arrived at the excavation site without any major issues. Fortunately, the players hadn't yet reached the concept of ‘state borders’ in their sociological development, even if they had hit upon the idea of patrols regarding the Infernals. But that was with the Infernals and Jabberwocky, who were very much overly serious about the game—most of the Players gathered in the dungeons didn't suffer from such problems.
Therefore, they didn't react to a new face appearing among them. No one even tried to press-gang Sturm into working; this was, after all, a game where building a fully functioning state was difficult. Equally as difficult was forcing a Player to do something they didn't want to do.
So, without much trouble, Sturm reached the very quarry that was the main attraction for the local Players. Though perhaps ‘quarry’ was too strong a word—the quarry looked less like a proper mining operation and more like an uneven funnel plunging downward, dug into by Players tossing explosive potions like they were TNTs. And since the process included the need for actual aim, they missed just as often as they were able to hit the actual bottom, causing the tunnel to descend unevenly, speckled with potholes here and there, but at least the walls didn't seem inclined to fall apart and bury everyone inside the quarry.
Still, no one was too keen on testing the strength of the quarry walls by getting closer or going inside the quarry. Which is why the Players had resorted to throwing explosive potions instead of using the primary tool of the trade to dig: the shovel.
Double, stepping slightly toward the edge of the quarry, didn't go all the way for the same reason. Instead, he turned to a Player standing nearby.
“Have you guys been pounding away like this for long?”
“About three days now, on and off. Can't spend all our time throwing things at the dirt—some have work, some want to go beat up mobs." The Player turned away from his task for a moment to look towards Double. "Want to join in, or are you just here to tell us that we’re wasting our time? For the first, there's the foreman; for the second, there's the exit."
"Nah, just taking a look," Double shrugged, deciding to keep quiet about exactly why he was here before casting a glance at Sturm. Sturm, in turn, nodded and tried to inspect the funnel as much as possible from his position before turning back to the Player he was just talking with.
"Found anything interesting?"
“Nothing interesting yet—just dirt and rocks. But we aren't giving up," The Player shrugged again. Then, at hearing the foreman's call, a bottle of explosive potion flashed into existence in his hand as he drew his arm back for another throw.
Sturm sought out Double's gaze, trying to convey a silent question—should they stay here, or had they fulfilled Signia's order to ‘find out what's happening’ and could they now head back to the ship? He didn't get the chance to voice it.
The flasks that were just thrown ruptured, and an explosion happened, but rather than just one explosion, instead, every Player within a hundred meters of the tunnel heard a loud, continuing cracking sound.
"EVERYONE BACK!" The foreman barked loudly, grabbing the arm of a hesitating Player and yanking him backward away from the funnel. Sturm and Double also leaped back, watching as the tunnel slowly began to crumble onto itself with a thunderous crash. For a time afterward, the collapsed funnel continued to emit soft, strained cracking sounds.
A few seconds later, the cracking repeated, then intensified, a distinct sound of shifting air as large masses of soil moved in a short amount of time; the ten-meter-wide funnel abruptly began to slide inward, collapsing into a void underground.
"We breached it!"
A player's joyous shout was drowned out by the voices of others panicking in fear.
"Cave-in!"
There was no time to ponder that this exact type of cave-in was what they had been trying to achieve all along; the crumbling earth beneath their feet, repeatedly battered by uneven throws of explosive potions, continued to break apart, dragging down overly eager Players who had ventured too close to the edge.
A sharp shout, filled with an untranslatable mix of curses and interjections, echoed off the walls of the much wider quarry before its source—a Player—was cut off mid-exclamation with a quiet, barely audible ‘squelch,’ having found the floor of the cavern.
"BACK I SAID! GET BACK!" The foreman's sharp commands were mostly for show, since, apart from the one Player who had tumbled down, everyone else had already bolted backward. They were able to watch the funnel's deepening and widening from a safe distance, allowing the collapsing to finally settle.
When the hole had widened to about twenty meters across and remained quiet for a good ten seconds, giving no intention that it would spread further, the foreman visually swept his eyes over the gawkers, making sure that no one was about to jump into the hole. With a slow step, he tentatively placed a foot forward and stomped on the slopped ground a few times, checking if it was safe to enter the funnel or if it was about to collapse further the moment anyone placed their weight on the slope.
Thankfully, the funnel, however, didn't decide to swallow the foreman whole. To test it further, the foreman gingerly jumped up and down, testing its resistance to vibrations.
When the funnel passed this test as well, the foreman exhaled a sigh of relief. "Well, the funnel's stable… enough. Now we'll just have to figure out where its structural integrity actually ends and how we're going to build structural reinforcement."
"Yeah, and excavating minerals and ores is smart business, profitable too," Double offered his own opinion while the other Players began to recover from the shaking, passing the good news down the line and reacting mostly with happy nods. After all, a new location to explore was always a good thing.
"You bet. Though we don't have any instruments to do it like I'm used to," The foreman sighed and shook his head. "So we have to use the old-fashioned method that the old miners used to use—'jump; if it doesn't collapse, you can live with it.'"
"On the other hand, there's no permanent death here either, so the penalty for a mistake is much lower," Sturm noted philosophically, to which the foreman only wrinkled his nose.
"Maybe there's no death, but being buried alive is no consolation; getting stuck inside a mine shaft is also no fun. It’s not like there’s any government that we could call for help, so everyone would be cursing as they dig themselves out of a cave-in."
"Fair point," Sturm nodded, adjusting his view of the situation before looking back at the foreman. "So what are you going to do now?"
"I'll try to estimate just how stable the quarry now is and just where it is stable and ask the other miners to mark a radius. Then we'll try to go down." The foreman got distracted for a moment talking to Sturm, allowing a Player—who wasn't particularly interested in the geophysical work of an engineer—to sneak forward to the edge and peer into the formed funnel before joyfully announcing to the gathered crowd his findings.
"I see a cave! There's water down there, an entire lake, I think!"
"Step back, you idiot! It could still collapse more!" The foreman barked in a commanding voice, hitting the lizard brain part of the idiotic Players, the instinct to shy away from the loudest person, before they finally took a step back away from the ledge.
The foreman watched the Player stepping back before letting out an exasperated sigh. "I've seen enough idiots in the quarry in real life, and now here in the game world as well…? I don't know what God runs things here, but Lord save us."
"But now we know the edges are more or less stable and there's a cave with water, and maybe even a lake down there," Sturm noted, almost idly.
"Like hell we do. We only know the edge didn't collapse this time; don't confuse that with structural stability. And water or a lake, so what? This high up, that could be anything! Some minerals could look blue enough to be confused for water this far up. Besides, even if it is actually water, down there, falling onto it from this height? It might as well be concrete. You’ll die all the same." Regarding Sturm, like he is an idiot, the foreman easily countered his words with an experienced retort that could be won through years of experience.
"Punching a hole is the easy part. Throw enough explosives and you're done. But turning that hole into a proper quarry—or a passage down—that's not a one-week job at the best of times. At least one month!"
"So wait, we need to wait that long before going down?" Double blinked at the news. A month in an MMORPG was the time it usually took Players to chew through some new continent added in the latest expansion. The idea that they would have to wait that long before they could get to a new location boggled his mind.
"Of course not. You'd have to wait that long for a real, large quarry." The foreman immediately stepped back and chuckled humorlessly. "But since we just have one twenty-meter hole punched through here, and I'm not going to be going to jail for a bad calculation or for some dead idiots, we just need to set up a perimeter so the funnel doesn't collapse and figure out a way down. The perimeter we'll do in about two hours. How long it'll take to make a ladder is the question, and where we can actually anchor it in the end is another. Well, if everything goes well, we should be done in two days, maybe three."
"And it's not clear what's down there yet?" Sturm felt stupid asking the question, but he couldn't not double-check the assumptions of the foreman in charge of handling the excavation. However, the internal justification for the question couldn't protect him from the foreman's eloquent glare.
It seems that Sturm had earned another notch for idiocy in the foreman’s mind.
"A cavern, if that’s not obvious," the man drawled. "A cavern with something at the bottom. We won't have a more precise answer until we go down, and we can't do geological exploration without machines that no one here has built yet—or without magic, which no one here has found yet either. There's something down there, but as for what it is? The devil only knows."
"Understood," Double nodded, then met Sturm's eyes and jerked his head to the side. They had gotten what they came for—information about the ongoing excavation—so they could now take their leave.
"Well, good luck with that, gnomes."
"Dwarves," the foreman corrected automatically, before turning back to his crew. "Gnomes cast illusions; we dig underground. If only the beer was somehow alcoholic in this game and we can gain an actual buzz…"
“Yeah. It would make playing three times as enjoyable, that’s for sure,” Double replied with a chuckle before walking away with Sturm. They left the foreman with the crowd of players who had started peering into the breach, to which the foreman reacted instantly with a commander's shout.
"Alright, everyone stay put! We're going to check the stability now…"
***
I watched the scene of the Players running face-first into my encoded physics and shook my head in approval of their actions. Check for ground stability, weave ropes, do whatever you want, just as long as you stay occupied. And once the first Player to descend the hole is vaporized by acid fumes and the second dies from a fish monster leaping to eat their newfound morsels. Well, then the Players can waste more of their time solving those problems.
The main thing is that the Players spend a long time doing it, making small, incremental progress, exactly what's needed to placate and engage the masses of players in a gameplay loop.
As for the ‘dwarf’ complaining about the non-existent alcohol? Well, it’s only non-existent for the Players, as unlike the players, I wasn't bound by the simulation's restrictions. Therefore, theoretically, I could recreate beer, wine, or any super-expensive cognac with five zeros for myself and drink myself silly.
But of course, I didn't, unsure of how inebriation would affect me in my current situation. If it simply didn't work, it would just end in mild disappointment regarding my current state, which wasn't particularly problematic; I'd grown used to disappointment lately.
But if it did work? And a ‘brilliant’ idea popped into my head like, ‘Hey, let's actually launch a meteor at the Players who stuck their noses where they didn't belong again!' The consequences of that decision would have to be handled soberly. And the Players are currently doing a fine job of creating problems for me on their own; I don't need to start inventing my own crises just to ‘heroically’ solve them later.
Therefore, my celebration of the event, that is, celebrating that the Players had breached the top of the subterranean lake, was purely symbolic. I applauded the Players’ progress and returned to solving the next crisis.
Togra was practically ready, not to the point where I could leave it and start thinking about creating the next major location, but to the point where, if necessary, I could shove it into the live game. The NPCs, quests, shops, interesting locations, and resource piles—everything was in place; it just lacked final polish.
Ensuring that resources didn't just magically appear in locations but had a real underlying reason for their presence, maybe pirate ship convoys, the crops growing in fields, warehouses filling up, and other factors that regular games ignored completely.
The things that makes my game ‘special.’
In other games for example, a shop that has a hundred swords for sale, at any moment the merchant is supposed to be ready to pull a hundred swords from their magical dimension, filling a Player’s inventory space. After which, a week later, or whatever span of time that the developers wanted, the magical force called ‘gameplay convention’ would resupply a hundred swords to the inventory of the merchant, who hasn't moved from their spot even once in all that time.
In a shop that is always open 24/7, all week, all month, all year.
In a normal game, such a gameplay convention costs nothing; in fact, it was only to the benefit of the Players.
Having to walk to a warehouse, then try to carry away everything bought, then wait for the merchant to get a new shipment, and then also strive to be first in line so no quicker Player catches the merchant first and buys the desired resource first. Would that be fun? Well, maybe for a certain number of Players, but definitely not for the millions who log into the game once a day for a couple of hours to kill time.
However, in my case, a game that focuses on ‘hardcore and realism’ absolutely could not rely on that type of gameplay convention, even despite the fact that all my hardcore elements had their limits. If Players had to actually spend three months growing wheat, cultivating the soil, spraying it for pests, and then building a thresher to harvest it, all while fending off goblins coming for a snack and pirates who don't want wheat prices to drop—the Players would quickly realize they get enough ‘realism’ in the very real world.
After all, this was still a game about magical… Middle Ages? Steam Age? Dark Ages? Hard to say; all sorts of anachronistic technologies are mixed together in the game at once.
In short, since I wasn't creating a completely alternate world in which the average inhabitant of our modern world, accustomed to getting burgers delivered while they're still hot and using colorful paper to buy plastic models of their favorite characters, was unfit to live in, I needed to find that delicate line between ‘hardcore, realism, the best game in the world’ and ‘why did the guards arrest me for trying to enter city hall with a weapon? I just wanted a quest.’
And the problem with that, of course, was that I was working blind, relying solely on my understanding of the flimsy line between ‘realism’ and ‘too difficult.’
The Players, of course, to my great joy, for once weren't trying to open the sky with a can opener to see how the celestial gears turned and if there was anything beyond the firmament. But that only removed a constant irritant—for now—it didn't extend a helping hand with my current problem.
Therefore, as before, I needed a control group. The pirate capital was both ready and simultaneously too raw to allow access to all the Players all at once…
The phrase ‘Early Access’ flashed in my mind, but I quickly thought otherwise. Even if the big bosses would rejoice at the extra income, such a thing didn't suit me and my game at all. This wasn't a buggy Early Access game; this was a test run, where I needed just a few Players to act as guinea pigs to check the readiness of the location and find the most obvious blunders in my preparation. Not to set loose a horde of Players eager to quickly reach a new location.
For a moment, my brain imagined dumping this task on Jabberwocky’s shoulders too before I desperately squashed the stupid thought. Not only was he far too cunning and rarely traveled without his guards, but he was also too busy with his constant work as ruler of the first Player city and leader of the first guild. Sending that man to a Pirate city seems like the beginning of a joke.
Plus, after opening the passage down to the magical lake, he had even less time for expeditions. And frankly, how he would reach Togra was a non-trivial question; I didn't want to announce that the teleporter goes to the Pirate city too. At least not without a good reason that would satisfy the Players. Not to mention that if I set up a two-way portal for Players in Togra, they would instantly and in massive concentration start pouring into my unfinished location.
And exactly because I couldn't simply allow that, I was currently dealing with the problem standing before me.
So, I need a way to send players to Togra in very measured doses. And that only means one thing: the Pirates' sky ships, of which there are exactly only two working ones in the whole game. Even though Jabberwocky spun like a snake on a skillet, moving here and there to gather power, he couldn't single-handedly solve all the ‘Quests’ in the game, and so the bulk of the Players who once gathered in factions around the Pirate sky ships never seriously got around to repairing them, seeing as my old idea of pitting the players against each other in a war to repair ships had failed.
Well, it didn't particularly matter, considering it hadn't stopped the Players from getting bogged down in their own problems without any encouragement from me. And the fact that instead of a fun total war of all against all, they were seriously pondering jurisdictional issues in the game world, who ruled which lands, and which mobs were mass-bred for slaughter didn't bother me at all. The main thing was to keep their hands busy after all.
And this in turn means that even theoretically, there were exactly two groups of Players suitable for traveling to Togra holding working pirate sky ships. And since I wasn't crazy enough yet to send demon-worshippers on a brave campaign to the Pirate lands, even if pirates were three times as understanding regarding demons, it meant I could only dispatch one group.
On the other hand, having discovered the collapsed cavern and, crucially, having transmitted the information about it back to the surface, Sturm and Double still didn't have anything else interesting to do on the sky islands. Which meant it was time to put my laboratory animals, I mean, Players, who were the very first to discover a new location and unique quests, to their intended use.
***
Reaching the designated spot with Signy's airship continuing to hover in place, Sturm waved his hands a few times, signaling to the pirate crew that he was in position, before they, having verified his identity and the identity of Double beside him, finally dropped the rope ladder down. A moment later, having climbed aboard the airship, Sturm stretched his arms, relieving a mental tiredness in his arms after climbing such a tall rope ladder. Leaning on the ship's rail, he watched as Double pulled the ladder back up before locating Signy herself with his gaze.
"It is done, Captain. The people below had dug a passage and hit something. Nobody can say what exactly they found yet, but judging from the initial looks, it’s a large cave with water at the bottom. Now everyone is thinking about how to get down and what else might be down there that they can't see from above. It'll only become clear in a couple of days, once they get down."
"Understood," Signy nodded at his words and glanced at Double, who had climbed up and was pulling the ladder in behind him. "Well, that's good. The fewer variables, the better the situation, and if they want to dig in the dirt and dig holes, let them. We have a much more serious situation."
"Serious as in good or bad?" Sturm immediately straightened up, standing a little taller, as if preparing to receive a real order from his superiors. He didn't have time to reflect on how much the game influenced him, considering he seriously began to treat instructions from an in-game faction quest-giver as his actual boss assigning a task just because Signy frowned slightly and shook her head.
"I'd like to say good, but in life, nothing truly good and free ever stays that way."
Double, having secured the rope ladder, stepped closer to Signy but didn't interrupt her, perfectly guessing that Signy would continue her speech without his prompting, and he was absolutely right. "The storm is gradually starting to die down. It hasn't calmed completely yet, but I did a quick survey and can make out a few old landmarks, so we can try to feel out a course through it and return to Togra."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Double raised a perfectly valid question and received a perfectly valid answer from Signy.
"In this life, even eating food is dangerous; you could choke and die. The question isn't whether it's dangerous or safe, but what we're going to do about it. The fact that the storm is gradually starting to calm down means that, sooner or later, it will calm down completely. And when it calms down completely, all your brethren will rush forward to Togra."
"And… are we supposed to stop them?" Sturm raised an eyebrow, mentally chewing on the idea. Although, theoretically speaking, Sturm could try to do it, practically, however, with just one airship, they couldn't manage it against millions of players simultaneously.
Not to mention the amount of hatred Sturm would earn from the Players if he decided to take on the task of denying them new game content. Fortunately, Sturm's assumption was instantly shot down by Signy herself.
"No, we have to profit from it." Signy shook her head before surveying Sturm and Double in front of her.
"The most important asset of any merchant is the information they possess. And right now we have information that the storm is starting to calm down, and an unknown but large number of people would soon begin to prepare to cross this storm when it ends. Meaning…"
"Meaning we need to be first. Figure out where the Players will head to, what they'll demand, who will need what supplies, and who will need what," Double hadn't realized until this moment that the extra ‘international market analysis’ elective he took years ago under pressure from his professors would be useful for playing multiplayer games, but life was unpredictable like that.
"Buy what can be profitably resold. Or at least sell the information itself before it loses value."
"Oho," Signy smirked slightly at Double's words. "Were you a pirate before?"
"Something like that," Double chose not to touch upon the idea of getting an economics degree solely because he couldn't get any other, or about parents who demanded a degree from him anyway, or the extra elective courses that professors pushed on students to justify their financial bonuses to their bosses.
Instead, he focused on the task at hand. "What exactly are we going to do now?"
"I've already chartered a rough course while you were checking on the people below. We have enough supplies from when Sturm brought them in, so right now, go around the ship and check that we aren't moored anywhere." Signy nodded and instantly shifted into work mode, quickly dispensing orders to the two Players.
"Then I advise you tie yourselves to the ship and hold on tight so the storm doesn't accidentally rip you off the deck. Is the task clear?"
"Aye aye, Captain!" Sturm immediately saluted at the order, and this time his salute didn't look mocking or sarcastic, as any Player's salute might look in an online game. However, Sturm didn't bother filling his head with thoughts about how highly realistic, immersive games might be affecting his perception of reality.
Instead, he turned to Double. "Well then? Let's go inspect the ship."
After a brief five-minute inspection confirmed the sloop was ready for departure, Sturm and Double returned to Signy, relaying this information before she headed inside the cabin. A couple of minutes later, the airship, which had been peacefully moored in one spot until then, emitted a rhythmic hum, turned in place, and, taking a course known only to Signy's internal compass, headed forward.
Sturm's and Double's hearts started beating faster as the ship slowly flew closer to the rolling storm, taking a path that would shield them from the Players’ eyes. A storm that had proved insanely deadly to all living beings that got stuck outside the shelters when the storms rolled. The only thing that calmed their hearts was that their captain had told them that the storm was subsiding and they wouldn’t die instantly.
It was, of course, bogus information; the storm wasn’t subsiding at all. The game creator had simply made Signia’s ship the sole exception to its deadly effects.
The two Players, however, ignorant of this fact, settled peacefully into their designated nook in the cabin. After Signy told them the flight would take a few hours at best, or maybe a day at worst, they logged out. And I, in turn, moved from observing the floating ship, moving on to the other Players continuing to swarm, sorting out their current in-game problems.
Someone was calculating how many imps they needed to catch; someone else was trying to figure out the price of an explosive potion; and yet another was urgently applying their engineering knowledge, trying to determine how they ought to construct a ladder leading down into the open underground cavern.
The vast majority of the Players hadn't yet interacted with the game’s story contents, since none of the newly introduced major locations had been cleared a hundred percent, but I was already ready for a—let's call it a ‘closed beta test’—of the new location. What had seemed like an impossible miracle to me, creating a fully fledged major location while Players still hadn't figured out the previous one, had been accomplished by my own hands just a month after this whole adventure started.
Not that I had a choice or any ability whatsoever to influence my participation or lack thereof in this matter, but ultimately I was forced to say…
"I'm pretty good," I nodded to myself, rising to a bird's-eye view in one smooth motion, looking down at the crowds of people swarming beneath my feet.
"And on the seventh day, the Lord looked upon his creation—and saw that it was good..."
Granted, it was still too early for me to take a day off on any day, but I could certainly pat myself on the back for successfully passing the one-month milestone of my life and existence here.
And if I could do it, that meant I was obligated to do it.
After all, if players could be guided by the logic of ‘I can, therefore I must,’ why shouldn't I reply in kind? Am I the god of the game world or not, after all?