Might as Well

The new pod was amazing!

He felt like a new man. Well, that was a little exaggerated, but he did actually feel the difference compared to when he was only using the helmet. It was as if something had been weighing him down, and now it had been removed.

He didn’t suddenly become more powerful, as his stats didn’t change, but he could control his body better.

‘And this is only the first-generation pod…’ he wondered as he jumped around in the first chamber of the fracture that the Silvercrest family had taken over at the mines. It was low-leveled, but it had enough monsters in it to allow him to test things.

He slowly went through all his skills, first using only basic elemental spells, then shadow, and finally wind spells. Finally, he did a run with only his sword. And one where only Lucky fought as the loyal wolf decided he wanted to have a go too and Sam didn’t have it in him to resist the puppy-dog eyes.

Sam just stood in the back and occasionally supported his companion as it tore through the horde of monsters populating the fracture.

He left the area with a quiet thanks to the staff who were very accommodating, satisfied with the properties of the pod. He also sent off a quick message with the results to Lucy and asked her to make sure every key player in the guild and company would have access to one. Isabella, Katie, and Lara probably wouldn’t have issues with it, but Dan and Liz would need the help as they didn’t have the same resources as the others.

Returning to the city, he took some time to walk around and see what the general response was to the continuous crash of the gold’s worth.

Donning a disguise both with clothing and with his Chameleon mask, after sending a happy Lucky back into his shadow, he entered the city.

After barely five minutes, he had a small glimpse into how the populace was handling the event.

Most NPCs were indifferent, as the gold in their world usually fluctuated. Mostly because of some magical catastrophe or somebody finding a new mine. So, a few percentages here and there didn’t mean much.

Though, as the consummate business people they were, they naturally made use of it and raised the prices, citing inflation with a face carved out of stone and eyes glittering with greed.

Most everyday players – people who logged in maybe once or twice a week – were pretty bummed but seemed to also not care. They just played the game, not caring about the higher economics.

The most outspoken group about this event were, naturally, the professional players. Players whose salaries depended on the gold they made.

Of course, some guilds and groups provided some basic salary, but most of them just took the gold the players made and converted that to real-world money. Consequently, most of these guilds relied on the members using their gold to pay for various services. Like housing in the guild building, access to training locations and personnel and even to borrow some high-quality equipment.

Most of them, naturally, either shut down these services until the gold situation stabilized or increased the price to match the real-world value of gold from the game. Which made it impossible for the regular players to access them.

There were already grumblings on the streets and taverns. Sam walked around, joined some groups gathered here and there, and listened to their complaints, adding his own opinion here and there.

“Oh, yes! It is horrible what those greedy guilds are doing!”

“Exactly! What were they even thinking?”

“Completely ruins the game! I agree!”

“We should take back the means of production! Glory to the people!”

And so it went, sowing a little chaos everywhere while gathering information. He ended back in one of the biggest plazas of the city, full of people hawking their wares and people trying to enjoy their days.

He was about to buy some snacks, as the smell was heavenly, when his messenger rang. It was Adam.

“Yes?”

“Get back to the guild. It’s a madhouse,” the man said before hanging up.

Sam blinked in surprise, then cast a longing look at the tantalizing meat skewers, sighed, and turned toward the direction of their guild headquarters.

Between two blinks he vanished, nobody but some lone ravens noticing his sudden departure.

Madhouse was not really a good word to describe the situation. But he didn’t hire Adam for his skills in the art of wordsmithing.

When he arrived at the building, he was instantly beset by the loud voices of the group of people who had gathered in front of the headquarters of Chrysalis. It took only a few seconds to find out what they wanted.

He slunk away into the shadows, going around the building, avoiding the crowd, to the back of the building.

There Sam was met with a group of players from the guild, standing guard, looking rather frazzled.

He slowed down as he emerged from hiding, not wanting to scare them.

The moment they spotted him, they all stood to attention, their hands on their weapons or their magic, ready to strike.

“Halt!” the person in front called out. “This is private property!”

Sam just smiled and took out a guild token and showed it to the guard.

The guy frowned but accepted the token. The rest still kept an eye on him and the surroundings, ready for anything. Sam approved.

After a quick test, the guy handed the token back and gave him a quick and sloppy salute.

“Welcome back, sir! Sorry for…” he began to explain but Sam just held up a hand.

“Don’t worry. I get it,” he smiled at the worried-looking guy.

“Thanks…” The relief was very audible in his voice.

“Has anyone tried anything?” he asked curiously as the rest of the group relaxed finally.

The guard, whose name Sam still didn’t know, shook his head. “No, the crazies are at the entrance, trying to get into the guild. But…”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “But?”

“Several thieves tried their luck.”

“And?”

The guy just smugly shrugged. “They tried…”

“Good,” Sam said, then clapped the guy on his shoulder as he walked by. “Keep up the good work.”

The inside of the headquarters wasn't any calmer.

People were standing in line, while guild officials sitting behind desks tried to determine at first glance if they were flakes or had a chance to pass the guild test. The rest of the guild stood around, decked out in armor and weapons unsheathed, glaring at anyone who tried to act out.

Even as he walked past the chaos, he saw them drag out several people who tried to cut the line by insisting that they were stronger than any of the people there.

In a minute, he found himself in Adam’s office, watching as the other man went through reams of documents with blinding speed.

“Do you actually have a skill for that?” he asked bemusedly, as he felt the small emanations of mana as the muscled guild master handled the documents.

Adam just grunted but didn’t look up.

“What do you want me to do?”

“What do you mean?” he asked with a grin.

Adam sighed, put his pen down, and looked up at him with a frown. “You clearly planned for something like this with our contribution point system. I assume you also have a plan for this?”

Sam smiled and nodded. “Sure.”

Adam said nothing, just sat there and stared at him expectantly.

“Just accept everyone that comes our way and have them do the test. If they pass then good, if not then it’s no skin off our nose…”

“What about the spies? Perfect time to slip in some…”

“Leave that to Tim and Lucy.”

“Are you sure?”

Sam walked forward and took the only seat present. “Look, I know your trust has been…shaken… but we are not playing around. Lucy and Tim have my trust, just as we trust you.”

Adam opened his mouth to reply, but Sam held up his hand. “I know we haven’t been working together for long, but I like to think that I and the rest of the team aren’t going to do you like your ex-friend! By the way, how is it going with him?”

“He tried to break into my old apartment,” came the deadpan delivery.

“Anyone hurt?”

“No, it was being aired after cleaning, so nobody was there. Just the cameras…”

“You expected this?” Sam asked, surprised. Adam was a genius when organizing things, but planning for this kind of human behavior seemed a little out of character for him.

Adam blushed a little. “It was my grandmother who set it up,” he explained.

“Ah! Smart woman…”

“Indeed…”

They lapsed into silence after that and spent a minute eyeing each other. Finally, Adam broke the silence.

“Look. Sam. You helped me with something big. Nothing will change that. Which means I owe you big. And I’ll make sure to pay it back. But you’re seriously creeping me out with your knowledge and I simply want to know if I should expect a high-powered corpo lawyer from the game company to knock on my door with a contract I can’t refuse.”

Sam just chuckled. “Don’t worry. I’m not doing anything illegal… or immoral.”

Adam digested that statement before asking another question. “Then… how are you doing this?”

Sam just leaned back and spread his arms wide while grinning. “I’m just that good, baby!”

The man sitting in front of him sent a withering glare, but in the end, let out a quiet sigh and nodded.

“Alright, I suppose that’s the best I’ll get for now.”

Sam gave an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, I don’t know what else to tell you…”

“No, no… I get it. Everyone has their own secrets. I just wanted to make sure yours don’t fuck up my life even more than the secrets that my previous ‘friends’ held.” He took a deep breath, then continued. “Alright. Enough about that. Let’s talk business…”

Sam nodded and leaned forward, watching as Adam took out a few documents.

“So far, we've got around a few hundred viable applications.” He showed Sam the list. “It’s just not viable to test them one by one. Especially with the way people are gathering at the front. We already had several visits from the guards. I don’t think they are going to stay happy for long. Especially if the players start to riot when we refuse them.”

Sam took the document, scanned over it, looking for interesting names, but he didn’t spot anyone.

“Then just do the test in batches,” he commented with a shrug. “Have them pair up, let’s say in three people groups and assign one guild member as observer for the first test. Then off they go to the fractures.”

“That will give us a very biased result…” Adam warned him.

“Hmm… true. What about a free-for-all? Hundred people go in, ten leave?”

“Unfair to support classes,” came the rebuttal.

“Damn… How about a mix? We set groups of DPS and tanks and have them fight against each other while a randomly assigned support class helps them. We judge the support classes by how well they keep the players alive, while the rest about how well they can kill other players.”

Adam looked thoughtful for a moment. “That… is a little rough around the edges but it could work. How about…”

As the other man’s brain kicked into high gear, Sam just sat back and smiled while listening to him.

He was just climbing out of his pod, having dealt with the Great Guild Recruitment Catastrophe and then doing some work around the company headquarters, when his phone rang again.

“Yes?” he answered, holding the device between his ear and shoulder while pulling his pants on.

“You doing anything important?” Lucy asked, and Sam could hear the frown in her voice.

“Nothing important, just trying to put on pants…” he said while trying to put his leg in the bunched-up leg of the pants.

“What? Nevermind. Check the news!”

“Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter!”

He walked over to his living room and turned on the giant screen. After a few seconds of clicking, he had one of the local news channels playing.

“…currently the drop in the price of the in-game currency, known as ‘gold’, has caused severe chaos in the market. With the rise of the Virtual Reality game, Magic Unknown, their in-game currency has embedded itself into the lives of many people with remarkable speed. However, this fast expansion seems to be the undoing of this phenomenon.” The pretty newscaster read this with a routine smile as various images of despairing people played in the right corner of the screen. “Later, we will be discussing the issue with an economics professor, here at Channel Five, but for now, let us turn our attention to the presence on the street…” The screen changed to another journalist standing in front of many Magic Unknown stores where a throng of people were kind of demonstrating and begging for the company to do something.

“What the hell, Sam?” Lucy asked.

“It seems the company is really drawing this out…” Sam commented. While to him personally, it was really weird to see it, thanks to his inherited memories, he had already lived through these times once. Sadly, the other Sam was one of those unlucky people who could only despair as they watched the value of their meager amount of gold evaporating.

“Why?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” and this time he was one hundred percent correct. Nobody knew why Future Unknown delayed intervening for so long. They could have had the cheaters within seconds thanks to the system. “Maybe the exploit is not in the game and they need to gather evidence?”

“How?”

“Best guess is that they've got insider information. That takes a while to prove…”

“And if they’re smart, practically impossible to prove…”

Sam just scoffed. “If they were really smart, they wouldn’t have crashed the gold market.”

Lucy chuckled weakly. “Does this change our plans?”

“No. But make sure to spread the information a little to the masses. They should be buying gold. With the current price, even a small amount of money will net them a steady profit when the market resurrects.”

“Spread the joy, eh?”

“Hmmm, something like that…” he answered as he settled in comfortably and began switching between channels. “How about something like this…”