In the Wire

Just a game

Razer and his friends rested for a moment, fallen Orcs lay on the ground, their loot slowly fading.

"Do you think we should get some of their gold or potions?" Neo asked.

Razer nodded, "Yeah you can run around and grab some if you want. One of the Orcs was carrying a map; I'm going to try and figure out where we are."

He pulled out a roll of old parchment and stared at the map. A red beacon hovered over the map and displayed their current co-ordinates in the corner of Razer's vision. There was a town located on the other side of the forest.

Razer turned to the others, "We'll head through the Zoaguan Forest to the town of Ongor. There'll probably be some NPC's there that we can trade with."

Neo and Xara both smiled as the three of them made their way into the forest. It wasn't a pleasant place to be; thorny vines hung low and scratched them, old relics sat indiscreetly in the distance and strange animals circled slowly around them. They looked like lions but had huge bat-like wings and a scorpion tail. A green liquid dripped off the tip, landing on the ground with a hiss.

Neo gulped, "Raze, I don't think we should risk getting stung by one of those things. It looked like acid."

Razer nodded and brought up the Kingdoms of the Void Encyclopaedia. It was one of the game's built in features that allowed them to look up the properties of anything in the game world. It identified them as Minor Manticores. The information panel showed that they prowled the forest in packs of three, sometimes a Lead Manticore would accompany them but that was very rare. They had a strength of 54 and defence of 33. They drop gold, health potions and sometimes a medium level weapon. Only found in the Zoaguan Forest.

The trio decided to avoid the Manticores for now, they still needed to level up more and get better gear before they tried to take on stronger foes. The Orcs must have been set to a lower strength to ensure that the three defeated them. They emerged into a clearing, Xara drew a deep breath, the smell of baked bread and wood burning ovens filled her with a peaceful feeling. They wandered the town, people sat and talked, merchants called out for people to buy their wares and children ran around laughing with delight.

Xara smiled, "This is a lovely place guys. I thought this game would be all violence and darkness but here it is beautiful."

Razer nodded, "Yeah but don't get too attached, these are only NPCs, they are just lines of code walking around the place."

Neo shook his head, "Those two over there are definitely not NPCs. They have status bars and I can see their gamer profiles. One of them is called Hermon The Great and the other is Silverslinger."
Razer's eyes widened, "That's impossible, the game wasn't supposed to be released until tomorrow. We better go talk to them. We won't have to worry about them trying to kill us, the town is a Peace Zone, meaning no PvP deaths."

Neo looked at him, "How long did you say you were in here before you told us about it?"

Razer smiled, "A day or so, there were a lot of bugs that are fixed now, but a lot of it is about the same."

The trio walked over to the two players, who turned and sized them up.

Razer smiled and scratched his hair nervously, "We don't want any trouble with you guys, we just wanted to know how you got in the game? I thought it wasn't supposed to be released until tomorrow."

Hermon grunted, "Well it was a featured game when I bought my new Link-Gear. Silverslinger and I bought our 2nd Gen Link-Gear and joined Kingdoms of the Void to test it out. Did you guys buy Link-Gear too?"

Razer nodded, "We only have 1st Gen Link-Gear, we found this game by snooping around background datastreams. How many others in the game?"

Hermon shrugged, "We started in town square where the Emperor's Guard were handing out starter packs to those who wanted them. We took them and sold most of useless stuff so we could buy ourselves half decent gear. There was probably about one hundred or so with us in town square but I was talking to some NPCs and they said that players start in the town square of all four towns and are evenly spread out over them. If that's the case there's close to four hundred players in the game at the moment."