Collide Gamer

“YOUUUUU!!!”

John felt the smack of the gnarled tip of the wizard’s staff in his soul, despite the intervention of Particle Skin. It hit him right in the forehead, making him flinch. An unusual reaction, partially fuelled by the tipsiness the light but consistent drinking over the past hour had brought about.

“YOU DAAAAAAARE!”

The owner of the staff pulled it back. He was an old man with a bushy, if thin, head of hair and a long, equally messy beard. He stood at the height of John’s waist, though he may have reached all the way to his chin if the body under the blue robe hadn’t been bowed by age.

“YOU SHOW YOUR FACE BEFORE MEEEEEEEEE?!”

John caught the second strike with a singular finger. Casual violence in the Abyss was a complicated matter. In the mundane, where a singular stumble could lead to a lethal experience with the edge of a sidewalk, even a slap had quite the consequences. In the Abyss, where people frequently had flesh as or stronger than copper, getting beaten by a wooden staff as a greeting was quite light.

John still did not appreciate being hit in the forehead.

“I don’t even know who you are,” the Gamer growled, flicking the staff back.

A small mountain jutted out of the grass-covered, brown soil, an entrance carved into the side of it, surrounded by rails and minecarts. The wizard stumbled back a step, catching himself by pulling the staff down and using its pointy end for its intended purposes. Once stabilized, he was right back to pointing at John.

“I am the mighty Mine Mage!” he declared. “I make mines that people can explore with my Innate Ability to make metals out of nothing! Do you get it yet, boy?! YOU HAVE INFRINGED ON MY BUSINESS AND I DEMAND COMPENSATION!”

John sharply raised one eyebrow. It wasn’t the first time he met someone whose Innate Ability was an unfortunately lesser version of what he got access to as a side benefit. Such was the inequality of magic. “Sounds like something you should direct towards my office,” he responded diplomatically.

“I very well have, boy!”

Left eye twitching, John felt his temper rise. Alcohol lowered an already small bit of patience he had for being addressed like this. “Call me boy again and I will see how closely your spine can resemble the tip of your staff.”

The Mine Mage opened his mouth wide, beginning to formulate another insult. Something in John’s expression or the aura of cold rage he exuded must have forced the wizard to reconsider. He glanced towards the tip of his staff, a roll of gnarled wood as stereotypical wizard staffs were often designed to be, then cleared his throat. “I have previously sent a message to your office, Emperor Newman, and only received… this.”

The wizard reached into the air, pulling a sheet of paper out of a pocket dimension. That he had one proved he was at least moderately wealthy. That he had printed out the contents of an email was a certified old-people move though.

There was only one line of text on the entire standard-sized print paper: ‘Waste my Master’s time again and I will bring to you a torment you can scarcely imagine.’

John did not need a date on it to know this was from the time Aclysia had served as First Servant of State. “Right,” the Gamer just drawled and handed back the paper. It notably did not include the message the Mine Mage had sent initially, which John doubted would put him in a positive light. Aclysia was a bit trigger happy, but she wasn’t usually that bad from the word go. “What do you want?”

“Recognition and recompensation!”

“Recompensation for what?” Magnus intervened, stepping forwards. “I know you. You graduated from the Mountain of Time in 1902 as the top of the year, then disappeared to go independent.” The Fateweaver looked to John, then around him. “Your operation has been lucrative, yes, but not that lucrative and you have been on the decline for years. I never heard of someone who went to the Mine went here before either.”

“Disrespectful whippersnapper! Who are you?!”

“Magnus Magus.”

“Oh, would you like some tea? Can I invite you to talk about the fine details of Natural Barrier prediction measures and content manipulation?” Seeing the elderly man drastically change his behaviour again was amusing. Rubbing his hands nervously, he made himself a little bit smaller still. “I am quite sorry for your loss. Magoi was a great man.”

“Indeed, he was.” Magnus’ tone was hard. He was clearly not in the mood to discuss his loss with some stranger.

“Before this all turns into elder abuse,” Maximillian intervened, “let me illuminate our purpose here. John here is having his Bachelor’s Night and we have been hopping across Wandering Barriers in search of entertainment. If your mine is open at this time, we would perhaps drunkenly explore it.”

“Oh, of course, of course – that’ll be 5 million USD per person for the entry and another 1 million per kilo of ore you extract.”

“Do you take Tokens?”

“Why yes, yes I do!”

Maximillian flicked a coin of expensive metal at the Mine Mage, who caught it with his mind. The disk hovered in front of his face for a moment, before he made an impressed sound and let it drop into his hand.

“Pleasure doing business with you... and if I send you another email for recompensation, what would I-“

Ted put a hand on the man’s shoulder and bent down. “Do not push it,” the general warned, calm, collected, drunk, and simple. Gulping, the Mine Mage then nodded and hobbled over to the small house he had dashed out of.

“Do we actually want to go in there?” John asked.

“Up to you, I just wanted him off our backs,” Maximillian answered.

“Eh, we already paid for it.” Shrugging, the Gamer led the way, taking a sip from the travel bottle he had in his hand. It still tasted like it was only orange juice, though he knew he had been upping the vodka content gradually. He knew and he did not care, the typical sign of accumulating percentiles of alcohol in his blood.

The mine was, well, a mine. The wizard clearly was experienced in his craft, managing to recreate the feeling of mineshafts going through a mountain to the same degree as the Building in the Guild Hall did.

“If the man had been less rude or if he was younger, I would try to employ him,” John drawled.

“I was thinking the same,” Maximillian remarked. “Might still do it. Unlike you, I am actually in need of a steady source of metals.”

Grunting, Magnus picked up a pickaxe. “Don’t bother. He’s well past his prime. The reason why business has slowed so much for him is that he can barely make new metals. It takes him months to prepare one of these mines and they’re mostly iron, copper, and low-level magical metals.”

“I’ll bring Delicia when I come over,” John promised. “I’m sure she can help you.”

“Will she though?” Maximillian asked. “She worked for House Habsburg before you whisked her away…”

“That’s a way to put ‘cured her of her illness and brat broke her’,” John joked.

“…but,” Maximillian continued unperturbed, “it’s no secret she wasn’t exactly happy with the aristocracy. Are you sure it’d be wise to pull her into this conflict?”

“A fair point,” the Gamer admitted. “She accepted Fusion’s change from republic to empire because it was me, she said as much, and she still isn’t all too happy about it. That being said, she’s a reasonable woman. My Delicia definitely knows that it’s better to have a monarchy than the anarchy brought by your rebels.”

“If you’re sure it won’t cause any strain.”

“I’ll just ask her what she wants tomorrow,” John answered. “If she refuses, that’s totally her right. If she agrees, you can trust her not to run a secret sabotage.”

“I know, she worked for me before,” Maximillian reminded John for the second time. “She’s got honour and she’s honest.”

“Yeah, my Delicia is pretty great,” John boasted and took the biggest gulp yet.

Backpack filled with alcohol behind him, bottle in one hand and pickaxe in the other, John followed Ted, who had quietly taken the point of their procedure. Magnus had fallen a bit behind, his gaze focused on something the rest of them couldn’t even perceive.

“Is this barrier made in an interesting manner?” John asked.

“Extremely interesting,” Magnus responded. “Wandering Barriers are pretty odd. I never learned how to make one.”

Ted stopped and suddenly hit a vein in the wall with his pickaxe. A pause that Maximillian used to exchange the empty beer in his hand with a fresh one from the backpack. “Can’t do it?” the king asked.

“Could do it,” Magnus clarified. “Weaving that sequence is complicated though. You have to learn to make a Protected Space with no entry point, which is already fundamentally unstable, then you quickly have to edit in a designated entrance and then that designated entry has to be specifically designed to connect to random nodes. It’d take me months of dedicated study and I prefer to use my time differently.”

“Does seem like a very specific skill to have,” John grunted in agreement. “For very little gain.”

“And yet this Mine Mage decided to do exactly that.” Ted lifted the chunk of iron ore he had gotten out of the wall with a pleased grunt. “Odd choice when he had everything lined up for him.”

“Some people look at success within society and decide they’d rather be free and poorer for it than rich and stifled.” John shrugged. “Not that he seems to have done poorly for himself.”

“Eccentrics all over the place,” Maximillian groaned. “Who is the weirdest person any of you have ever worked with?”

John scratched his chin with the grip of the pickaxe. “Difficult question.”

“What flavour of weird are we talking about?” Ted asked.

A helpless gesture later, Max clarified, “Whichever you feel like.”

“Scarlett.” There was not an iota of doubt in the general’s voice. “I thought I understood her just fine, then we had a deployment together during the Lorylim war. I was supposed to be the commander, but obviously I didn’t have authority over her. She still worked exactly within my expected orders and exceeded them even. We barely did anything that deployment.”

“She’s become exceptionally scary,” Magnus agreed.

“Has she?” John asked.

“””Yes,””” all three men answered in unison.

“She was scary before,” Maximillian elaborated further. “Then you just had to make her even more powerful and give her access to virtually infinite resources, turning the world’s potentially most effective information broker into a walking death machine.”

“And she’s scary and weird how?” John asked, confused.

Maximillian groaned at his inability to understand. Well, it wasn’t that John didn’t get it at all, Scarlett was objectively terrifying if she wanted to be. He just thought this was a bit much.

“Because,” the gravity king said slowly, “I never really know what she wants. Obviously she wants to grow her influence, but how and why, I don’t get.”

“She likes being involved,” John said with a shrug.

“Yeah and to people outside your harem, she is like the Horned Rat 2.0. She can know everything, infiltrate basically every kind of modern infrastructure, manipulate servers to give you false intel, and all of that was bad enough but now she can also hit people with an electricity lance from 500 metres away.” Maximillian shook his head. “If she wasn’t attached to you, she’d probably run five countries from a bunker by now.”

“Oh, definitely,” John agreed.

“Weirdest person I ever worked with… in my case it’d be who I worked for,” Magnus said slowly. “There was this one time I put up a series of Protected Spaces for the jester of a court of a small kingdom in the Eurasian steppes.”

“Really? What was that like?” John wondered.

“Just extremely weird.” Raising his pickaxe, the Fateweaver took his own crack at a vein of metal. Between swings, he continued, “They’re obviously… culturally different from us… and then the Jester also was… a massive weirdo. He tried to… make me sleep with… his sisters basically every… hour.”

“Worse problems to have?” Maximillian asked.

“You have no idea how insistent he got.”

“Weirdest person I ever worked with is probably Marathyu,” John continued the conversation.

“The insane blacksmith?” Maximillian asked. “What happened to him anyhow?”

“Was killed by the Lorylim after he forged a dagger out of a facet of Lyndell before she became Lyndell.”

“Can we talk about you banging not one but two goddesses of genocide by the way?”

“Look… all I can say… is I fixed them.” The Gamer crossed his arms, inviting them to refute that claim. When no one did, he continued, “Layla will be so much simpler by comparison.”

“Yeah, I don’t agree, but it’s your body you are risking getting stabbed repeatedly.” Maximillian hummed. “To answer my own question… weirdest person I ever worked with… Gaia, it’s probably my sister.”

“Ria is VERY weird,” John agreed, emphasizing the ‘very’ a bit too much, making it echo off the cave walls. “I am getting drunk… and this mine is boring me. Mine is better.”

“It’s a bit cooler with random monsters around,” Ted agreed.

“Back to the Guild Hall, then?” Maximillian asked.

In agreement, they left. Only Ted took a chunk of metal along.