![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Kingdom of Elements, part 1
Mar. 7th, 2019 06:09 pmAr-Tahrnra, City of Wind, rose majestically over the largest desert in Dammajrah in four concentric semicircular layers nestled against the side of a huge mountain. Its caramel-colored stone made it look like half of an elaborate cake as players approached it from the monster-infested desert that surrounded it, finally resolving, as one got closer, into a huge structure that looked like something between an Arabian city and an ancient Roman tower.
In reality, Al-Tahrnra wouldn't take up more than a small city block. It took less than three minutes for a character running at normal speed to make the circuit from its gates--where normal players were throttled off into different instances of its ground level--around the semicircle of the player bazaar with its brightly-colored banners and stalls, and back to the gate again.
A canal ran inside the periphery of the ground level's wall with no discernible source or exit, from gate to mountainside, and characters fished from it, chatting as they waited for their next bite to come. The palm trees in front of the city walls were jumbled randomly about, and the area's designer hadn't even bothered to rotate the identical models. Not to mention that the grass beneath the trees looked better suited to an American midwestern lawn than a Middle Eastern desert. The foley in the city was a random jumble of shuffles and murmurs, the music a near-tuneless two-minute crypto-Arabian jangle that most players turned off to preserve their sanity after half a dozen cycles.
It was like Kingdom of Elements was not a carefully crafted experience, but a poorly-thought-out product cobbled together from old assets that KingdomSoft had shat out on its "two new multiplayer games each year" schedule, all its city and character names cribbed from a name-generation web site. And that's because it was.
One had plenty of time to tally the reasons its cheap world didn't make any fucking sense when they were stuck there for good.
***
It was another mark of K-Soft's questionable design decisions that Ar-Tahrnra's ground tier was always overcrowded and laggy, and its second tier of NPC shops and cheap character "housing" all but deserted. Once you got to Ar-Tahrnra, you were well past the point of consuming fruit juice and bread to buff your character, and 5000 gold for padded cloth armor was not worth the walk upstairs when you could get the same item for a tenth the price downstairs in the bazaar. And you'd almost certainly have enough gold to pay the rent on the next-highest city tier once you'd fought your way through to the second chapter of the game's story mode.
These were facts that KallaMari, the mountain elf thief, planned to use to her advantage, as soon as she could convince her sister (and partner in crime), human monk Hyacinth, to play along. But Cyn was proving exceptionally, and uncharacteristically, stubborn about it.
The two of them stood outside the fruit seller's shop on the furthest end of the second tier from the staircase. The extraordinarily few players who bothered to stop on this level for any period of time never hoofed it all the way here from the other end of the semicircle. It was the perfect place for her to carry out her plan.
"I don't like this," Hyacinth said, fidgeting. "It feels wrong."
"Wrong? How?"
"None of the other players could even try this. It's cheating. And Amar..." She glanced through the archway door into the shop, where Amar, his name in italicized green text over his head, went through an idling animation where he wiped the counter in front of him--or a spot about two inches above it--with a slightly wavy rectangle that was supposed to look like a cloth.
"K-pop fruit seller? What about him?" Hyacinth's only response was embarrassed silence, so it took a moment for Kalla to realize what was going on. She sighed.
She'd only learned about this corner of Ar-Tarhnra's shop row in the first place because her boy-crazy sister came to this shop every day to buy garbage tier fruit juice and listen to Amar's canned voice clips over and over. If he were a real guy, she'd be a stalker! "I know you like his character model, but come on. He's a N-P-C." She emphasized each letter of the acronym sarcastically. "He couldn't care less if we steal from him, and no one else on this server could care less if he has no stock or cash, either."
"But the admins care. What if they catch us?" Hyacinth's voice, quavering in real fear, interrupted Kalla's frustrated train of thought.
"They could kick us off the server, and wouldn't that be terrible. Oh no, they'll ban us from this shitty game we've been stuck in for fuck knows how long. Not that they even could, or they would have already."
As far as Kalla could tell, Cyn was completely unwilling to act against K-Soft in any way. Her sense of martyrdom when it came to those people always trumped her sense of injustice. This put Kalla into a state of pity and anger that made her fight doubly hard, when Cyn couldn't bring herself to fight at all. Who knew if Cyn did it on purpose, if her timidity was some kind of emotional judo move that ended with Kalla offering help to her? It had been that way since they were little girls, and it wasn't bound to change anytime soon.
"I can't do it, Kalla. I'm going to go."
Kalla grabbed Cyn by the arm before she could do the hand motion to bring up the menu screen and initiate her home warp to their shared rental on the next tier up. Despite the roughness of her grip, Kalla's voice was gentle. She knew Cyn was responding more to her tone than what she was actually saying. She might have a crush on this avatar, but she'd been curious enough to give this scheme a try anyhow, so Kalla tried a different tack.
"Cyn, listen. K-Soft are the ones who put us into this situation in the first place. And those half-baked idiots have no idea how to get us out. Don't you want to get back at them, just a little bit? Even if it's just for a few gold? If it makes you feel any better, we can do it to Danaka instead." Danaka was the "crude mercenary" model who ran the meat shop two doors down, and who even now was picking her nose in one of her idle animations.
"No, no, it's okay, I agreed to do this." She swallowed. "To Amar. And I can still talk with him later even after you take all his stock."
"Uh... sure. You can do that any time," Kalla said brightly, though at this point she was getting genuinely worried about her sister's mental well-being. There were plenty of real boys who used K-pop guy as their avatar, so why hang out in a dusty, unused corner of the city and "chat" with Amar instead?
***
Kalla sidestepped in between the side wall of Amar's shop and the mountainside, the rough stone scratching against her in a disconcertingly convincing way. Despite their deserved reputation as a triple-Z developer, K-Soft was taking some effort to create the full sensorium that other developers did in their games. But it was inconsistent; from shoulders to knees she felt like she was squeezing through a slightly tight space, and she could hear her feet scuffing against the ground, but she could feel nothing underfoot. This gave her a sense of nauseating vertigo unless she consciously focused on other things.
It didn't take long before she made it behind the line of shops. She paused to examine the area before moving on to the next part of the plan. She could hear Amar's greeting clip, "Welcome to the juice shop! How can I help you?" and before her sister could hail the shopkeep again, sent a whisper to her.
"Cyn, I made it. There's a floor, so that's good."
"What do you mean, 'There's a floor'? Are you out of your mind? What would have happened if you'd glitched through the geometry? You could have died!"
Are you out of your mind, obsessing over robo-boy the juice seller? Kalla was tempted to say. "It's fine, everything's fine," she said, instead. "Solid as a rock. Though there's no sense of gravity, as usual."
"What's it like back there?" Cyn said, sounding a little too eager to change the subject.
"It shows K-Soft's superior quality control, that's for sure. It's actually pretty interesting. It looks matte gray, like slate, no texturing at all, and I can see the seams between the objects. The back door's here, though. I can see a white line around its location."
"Try the door, then. Let's hurry."
Despite Kalla's seeming insouciance, Cyn's worry was starting to set off her own sense of danger. So she did hurry toward the outline of the door, and gingerly pushed it open. Behind it, she could see Amar's back, and his admittedly appealing backside in its loose Arabian Nights-style pants. His italicized name showed correctly even from this direction. Cyn stood on the other side of the counter, with a hand raised toward her menu panel and the "talk" command.
"Look, the door's gray on that side even after you opened it. That's amazing," Hyacinth said.
"Yeah, that's amazing, all right. What do you think? Should we send a bug report?"
Her sister giggled nervously. "No, c'mon. What's next?"
Kalla related the plan to her, which depended entirely on the programming for this shop not accounting for a player behind the counter rather than in front of it. She'd already tried to climb over the counter from the front, with no success. There was a context-sensitive invisible wall along the front of the counter that allowed for interaction with the NPC, but not for player-character movement past that vertical plane.
The plan went like this: Cyn, on the "proper" side of the counter, would use the "talk" command to open up Amar's shop menu, and while that menu was up in Cyn's UI, Kalla would use the "steal" command to raid his stock. Usually a NPC would register a "steal" command as a "talk" command and turn to face you, but she wanted to see if this exceptional situation--skirting around the game's geometry in a way no other player could--was accounted for in the game's programming. If it was, good on K-Soft for actually paying attention.
But, of course, they hadn't paid attention. When Kalla used the "steal" command, Amar's entire stock lay in front of her in a column of neat, colorful icons. Orange juice, grape juice, pineapple juice--how do you get tropical fruit in the desert, anyhow?--and, in gold font at the top of the menu box, with a coin icon next to it, was Amar's daily allotment of cash. 92 silver, poor guy. It wasn't even worthwhile to walk over here to sell off your junk.
She couldn't help herself. She was like a child grabbing all the colorful packages she could reach from a shelf at the grocery store. Bottle after bottle of fruit juice went from Amar's stock into her inventory. And she nicked the 92 silver, too. "I got it, I got it all! Who said a mountain elf makes a shitty thief? Take that, 8 dexterity!" she exclaimed happily.
"Okay, good, great. Mission accomplished. Can we go?" Cyn said nervously, hurriedly closing the buy window on her side of the counter. Then she froze, staring up at Amar's handsome face. "What was that?"
"What was what?" Kalla said, confused.
"He said something. Amar said something to me."
"He always does. 'Come again soon!' or something like that..."
"No, I'm serious. He said, 'I'm so sorry, Hyacinth. They took all my stock.' He said my name, in his own voice."
"I didn't hear anything."
"Believe me, Kal, you know I wouldn't lie about something like this. He--" Hyacinth froze for a second, literally froze. No blink, no movement of her hands, nothing. Then her avatar fell to the floor with a horrifyingly realistic thump.
"Oh, shit! Lucy, are you okay?" Without thinking, Kalla shoved Amar to one side and leaped over the counter to the other side, hurrying toward her sister. Even as Kalla lifted Cyn's head and gently shook her, she saw from the corner of her eye that Amar was staring vacantly forward with a friendly smile on his face, as though no one were there at all. And then he blithely wiped the counter down.
Emma--KallaMari--felt fury in that moment, bone-deep and overwhelming. She hated him. If she could attack friendly NPCs, he would be dead, and fuck Lucy's stupid crush.
In reality, Al-Tahrnra wouldn't take up more than a small city block. It took less than three minutes for a character running at normal speed to make the circuit from its gates--where normal players were throttled off into different instances of its ground level--around the semicircle of the player bazaar with its brightly-colored banners and stalls, and back to the gate again.
A canal ran inside the periphery of the ground level's wall with no discernible source or exit, from gate to mountainside, and characters fished from it, chatting as they waited for their next bite to come. The palm trees in front of the city walls were jumbled randomly about, and the area's designer hadn't even bothered to rotate the identical models. Not to mention that the grass beneath the trees looked better suited to an American midwestern lawn than a Middle Eastern desert. The foley in the city was a random jumble of shuffles and murmurs, the music a near-tuneless two-minute crypto-Arabian jangle that most players turned off to preserve their sanity after half a dozen cycles.
It was like Kingdom of Elements was not a carefully crafted experience, but a poorly-thought-out product cobbled together from old assets that KingdomSoft had shat out on its "two new multiplayer games each year" schedule, all its city and character names cribbed from a name-generation web site. And that's because it was.
One had plenty of time to tally the reasons its cheap world didn't make any fucking sense when they were stuck there for good.
***
It was another mark of K-Soft's questionable design decisions that Ar-Tahrnra's ground tier was always overcrowded and laggy, and its second tier of NPC shops and cheap character "housing" all but deserted. Once you got to Ar-Tahrnra, you were well past the point of consuming fruit juice and bread to buff your character, and 5000 gold for padded cloth armor was not worth the walk upstairs when you could get the same item for a tenth the price downstairs in the bazaar. And you'd almost certainly have enough gold to pay the rent on the next-highest city tier once you'd fought your way through to the second chapter of the game's story mode.
These were facts that KallaMari, the mountain elf thief, planned to use to her advantage, as soon as she could convince her sister (and partner in crime), human monk Hyacinth, to play along. But Cyn was proving exceptionally, and uncharacteristically, stubborn about it.
The two of them stood outside the fruit seller's shop on the furthest end of the second tier from the staircase. The extraordinarily few players who bothered to stop on this level for any period of time never hoofed it all the way here from the other end of the semicircle. It was the perfect place for her to carry out her plan.
"I don't like this," Hyacinth said, fidgeting. "It feels wrong."
"Wrong? How?"
"None of the other players could even try this. It's cheating. And Amar..." She glanced through the archway door into the shop, where Amar, his name in italicized green text over his head, went through an idling animation where he wiped the counter in front of him--or a spot about two inches above it--with a slightly wavy rectangle that was supposed to look like a cloth.
"K-pop fruit seller? What about him?" Hyacinth's only response was embarrassed silence, so it took a moment for Kalla to realize what was going on. She sighed.
She'd only learned about this corner of Ar-Tarhnra's shop row in the first place because her boy-crazy sister came to this shop every day to buy garbage tier fruit juice and listen to Amar's canned voice clips over and over. If he were a real guy, she'd be a stalker! "I know you like his character model, but come on. He's a N-P-C." She emphasized each letter of the acronym sarcastically. "He couldn't care less if we steal from him, and no one else on this server could care less if he has no stock or cash, either."
"But the admins care. What if they catch us?" Hyacinth's voice, quavering in real fear, interrupted Kalla's frustrated train of thought.
"They could kick us off the server, and wouldn't that be terrible. Oh no, they'll ban us from this shitty game we've been stuck in for fuck knows how long. Not that they even could, or they would have already."
As far as Kalla could tell, Cyn was completely unwilling to act against K-Soft in any way. Her sense of martyrdom when it came to those people always trumped her sense of injustice. This put Kalla into a state of pity and anger that made her fight doubly hard, when Cyn couldn't bring herself to fight at all. Who knew if Cyn did it on purpose, if her timidity was some kind of emotional judo move that ended with Kalla offering help to her? It had been that way since they were little girls, and it wasn't bound to change anytime soon.
"I can't do it, Kalla. I'm going to go."
Kalla grabbed Cyn by the arm before she could do the hand motion to bring up the menu screen and initiate her home warp to their shared rental on the next tier up. Despite the roughness of her grip, Kalla's voice was gentle. She knew Cyn was responding more to her tone than what she was actually saying. She might have a crush on this avatar, but she'd been curious enough to give this scheme a try anyhow, so Kalla tried a different tack.
"Cyn, listen. K-Soft are the ones who put us into this situation in the first place. And those half-baked idiots have no idea how to get us out. Don't you want to get back at them, just a little bit? Even if it's just for a few gold? If it makes you feel any better, we can do it to Danaka instead." Danaka was the "crude mercenary" model who ran the meat shop two doors down, and who even now was picking her nose in one of her idle animations.
"No, no, it's okay, I agreed to do this." She swallowed. "To Amar. And I can still talk with him later even after you take all his stock."
"Uh... sure. You can do that any time," Kalla said brightly, though at this point she was getting genuinely worried about her sister's mental well-being. There were plenty of real boys who used K-pop guy as their avatar, so why hang out in a dusty, unused corner of the city and "chat" with Amar instead?
***
Kalla sidestepped in between the side wall of Amar's shop and the mountainside, the rough stone scratching against her in a disconcertingly convincing way. Despite their deserved reputation as a triple-Z developer, K-Soft was taking some effort to create the full sensorium that other developers did in their games. But it was inconsistent; from shoulders to knees she felt like she was squeezing through a slightly tight space, and she could hear her feet scuffing against the ground, but she could feel nothing underfoot. This gave her a sense of nauseating vertigo unless she consciously focused on other things.
It didn't take long before she made it behind the line of shops. She paused to examine the area before moving on to the next part of the plan. She could hear Amar's greeting clip, "Welcome to the juice shop! How can I help you?" and before her sister could hail the shopkeep again, sent a whisper to her.
"Cyn, I made it. There's a floor, so that's good."
"What do you mean, 'There's a floor'? Are you out of your mind? What would have happened if you'd glitched through the geometry? You could have died!"
Are you out of your mind, obsessing over robo-boy the juice seller? Kalla was tempted to say. "It's fine, everything's fine," she said, instead. "Solid as a rock. Though there's no sense of gravity, as usual."
"What's it like back there?" Cyn said, sounding a little too eager to change the subject.
"It shows K-Soft's superior quality control, that's for sure. It's actually pretty interesting. It looks matte gray, like slate, no texturing at all, and I can see the seams between the objects. The back door's here, though. I can see a white line around its location."
"Try the door, then. Let's hurry."
Despite Kalla's seeming insouciance, Cyn's worry was starting to set off her own sense of danger. So she did hurry toward the outline of the door, and gingerly pushed it open. Behind it, she could see Amar's back, and his admittedly appealing backside in its loose Arabian Nights-style pants. His italicized name showed correctly even from this direction. Cyn stood on the other side of the counter, with a hand raised toward her menu panel and the "talk" command.
"Look, the door's gray on that side even after you opened it. That's amazing," Hyacinth said.
"Yeah, that's amazing, all right. What do you think? Should we send a bug report?"
Her sister giggled nervously. "No, c'mon. What's next?"
Kalla related the plan to her, which depended entirely on the programming for this shop not accounting for a player behind the counter rather than in front of it. She'd already tried to climb over the counter from the front, with no success. There was a context-sensitive invisible wall along the front of the counter that allowed for interaction with the NPC, but not for player-character movement past that vertical plane.
The plan went like this: Cyn, on the "proper" side of the counter, would use the "talk" command to open up Amar's shop menu, and while that menu was up in Cyn's UI, Kalla would use the "steal" command to raid his stock. Usually a NPC would register a "steal" command as a "talk" command and turn to face you, but she wanted to see if this exceptional situation--skirting around the game's geometry in a way no other player could--was accounted for in the game's programming. If it was, good on K-Soft for actually paying attention.
But, of course, they hadn't paid attention. When Kalla used the "steal" command, Amar's entire stock lay in front of her in a column of neat, colorful icons. Orange juice, grape juice, pineapple juice--how do you get tropical fruit in the desert, anyhow?--and, in gold font at the top of the menu box, with a coin icon next to it, was Amar's daily allotment of cash. 92 silver, poor guy. It wasn't even worthwhile to walk over here to sell off your junk.
She couldn't help herself. She was like a child grabbing all the colorful packages she could reach from a shelf at the grocery store. Bottle after bottle of fruit juice went from Amar's stock into her inventory. And she nicked the 92 silver, too. "I got it, I got it all! Who said a mountain elf makes a shitty thief? Take that, 8 dexterity!" she exclaimed happily.
"Okay, good, great. Mission accomplished. Can we go?" Cyn said nervously, hurriedly closing the buy window on her side of the counter. Then she froze, staring up at Amar's handsome face. "What was that?"
"What was what?" Kalla said, confused.
"He said something. Amar said something to me."
"He always does. 'Come again soon!' or something like that..."
"No, I'm serious. He said, 'I'm so sorry, Hyacinth. They took all my stock.' He said my name, in his own voice."
"I didn't hear anything."
"Believe me, Kal, you know I wouldn't lie about something like this. He--" Hyacinth froze for a second, literally froze. No blink, no movement of her hands, nothing. Then her avatar fell to the floor with a horrifyingly realistic thump.
"Oh, shit! Lucy, are you okay?" Without thinking, Kalla shoved Amar to one side and leaped over the counter to the other side, hurrying toward her sister. Even as Kalla lifted Cyn's head and gently shook her, she saw from the corner of her eye that Amar was staring vacantly forward with a friendly smile on his face, as though no one were there at all. And then he blithely wiped the counter down.
Emma--KallaMari--felt fury in that moment, bone-deep and overwhelming. She hated him. If she could attack friendly NPCs, he would be dead, and fuck Lucy's stupid crush.
