Shift 38 – Cody
“Cock!”
Cody grabbed the top of his furry head and rubbed it vigorously, having completely forgotten to duck before stepping into the cramped back office. “Get fucking taller ceilings, Tripod!”
“Noooo!” Chadriel pouted as he shimmied into the room, expertly balancing a silver tray of fresh, homemade macarons. “Daddy’s perfect. He’s taller laying down.”
“Girl!” Thiccolus didn't even look up from his glowing, glass-pane tablet. He planted a meaty mitt firmly on his dumper and sighed. “Keep it in your pants. We’re getting closer.”
“Closer, my ass,” Glandalf grumbled. The old Wizard tapped his own glowing screen and swiped upward, casting his display onto the slightly larger, magically projected monitor hovering against the brick wall. “Look at this. Ten portals total. They’re all over the map. And they keep relocating.”
“Do you have corresponding geographical locations?” Brogrom asked, looking up from a heavily dog-eared, sticky-noted copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide. “We need to know exactly what to prepare for if something comes through.”
“Aside from the one Cody’s team opened back at the vape shop,” Glandalf muttered, his fingers flying across a magical, projected QWERTY keyboard, “only two others go to Earth.”
Cody’s orange fur stood on end. “Where do the others go?”
Glandalf set his glass tablet down on the wooden crate serving as a desk. “There’s no database entry for any of them.”
Brogrom stood up, the heavy book in hand, flipping frantically through his notes. “Do you have any source code for the destination sides of the portals?”
“Nah,” Glandalf shrugged, leaning back. “Searched with every permutation, but there are just no entries. It’s incredibly weird for a rendered object to just be nothing.”
Brogrom stopped, traced his finger down a page, and read quietly to himself. “Check the taser root directory to see if anything new is coming up.”
Cody followed along on his own glowing glass pad. “Look at that.” He swiped up, casting his screen next to Glandalf's. “Nine new entries.”
“Well, why did that happen?” Tripod asked, looking down at his own scribbled notes. The Halfling was casually holding a thick blunt in one hand and bouncing Chadriel on his knee. “They’re mechanics of magic. It's our world's engine. And why nine?”
Cody shrugged. “They were all activated initially by the taser shorting the system. But later, one was activated by a 9mm bullet. Look here.”
He pulled up a newly generated data entry labeled projectile_anomaly. The cramped room fell dead quiet. The only sounds were the rapid tapping of magical keys and the rustling of heavy parchment as the back-of-house crew got back to work.
“Look.” Glandalf stared intensely at a white text editor filled with rapid-fire strings of numbers. Every time a portal changed its physical position on the map, one string changed. “These hex strings are the key. They’re predictable.”
Cody watched along with everyone else. Coding and numbers were never his thing. Not like this, anyway.
“I see it, too.” Thiccolus pointed a perfectly manicured finger at the main projection. “That one there. Third down on the left. That’s the one at Suckin’ Vapes. It’s not moving. It's static.”
“No, look deeper,” Glandalf pointed at the cascading numbers. “The patterns. The two moving Earth portals are using a 5-9-3 pattern. Five numbers, nine permutations, three cycles. The rest have wildly different signatures. That one over there is 5-5-7. That one is 9-9-4. No two are exactly the same.”
“Are you saying we have portals to seven other worlds just sitting out there for anyone to stumble into?” Thiccolus gasped, looking aghast.
“Wait,” Chadriel said, scratching his chiseled chin. “Look at the tail numbers on the top left and second from the bottom right. Oh, and the two above that on the right. They’re wrapping. Four of them are just internal portals looping between each other.”
Glandalf slowly nodded as he took a delicate bite of Chadriel’s fantastic Semenflower Macaron. It was such a genuinely incredible flavor for such a horrifically cursed Mark-name. “Okay. So, that still leaves us with exactly three portals actively connected to unknown worlds.”
“Three is certainly better than seven,” Brogrom sighed, closing the heavy DMG with a thud. “I think it's time we officially meet Sara.”
“No, man.” Glandalf shook his frizzy, gray head. “I don’t want to bring everyone into this shadow op.”
“You mean you don’t want Earthers involved,” Thiccolus pressed him, his tone sharpening. “If Cody vouches for her, I trust her.”
“It's everyone else,” Glandalf shrugged, wiping a crumb off his grime-covered JNCO jeans. “We’re doing just fine monitoring the code on our own.”
“Glanny,” Chadriel chided, folding his arms over his rippling chest. “The woman has been here less than a fraction of your total lifetime, and she’s already claimed an entire sovereign zone from under the King, brought the Shafted up from the dregs of the Plunderdark, and is running at over 2,000% higher profit margin than Craig did by this time in his first year. She’s the strongest strategic play on the board, and you know it.”
Cody watched his friends furiously debate tabletop geopolitics, his feline eyes drifting hungrily toward the silver tray of macarons. There wasn’t a thing in the world that was going to stop him from tasting those delectable pastries. It was always a massive treat when Chadriel baked.
He stood up quickly—
“Cock! Goddammit!” Cody grabbed the top of his head again, rubbing the fresh welt vigorously as he bounced off the low rafter.
“You’re not even that much taller than me, damn,” Tripod laughed in rapid Halfling.
“Eat a dick,” Cody grumbled, snagging one of the sweet treats and popping it into his mouth.
“Later,” Chadriel smiled wickedly at Tripod. He reached under the crate and brought out a massive glass jar of homemade Habushu, a thick, coiled pit viper perfectly preserved in the amber liquor. “You’ve been hanging around here enough to know all the neighbors' birthdays, Cody, and you still can’t remember to duck when you walk? You’re a cat. Just walk on all fours.”
“Fuck that.” Cody slammed a heavy shot of the snake wine and tossed another handful of macarons into his mouth. “Fuck, that’s so much better than Earth food.”
“My boy knows his way around a kitchen,” Tripod said, giving Chadriel’s ass a loud, appreciative smack. “But really, Glanny, we need to meet Sara.”
“If you say so,” Glandalf sighed, turning his attention back to the cascading code.
“I do,” Tripod nodded firmly. “Who else is going?”
“Me, baby,” Chadriel said, dramatically falling back onto the plush chaise lounge in the corner. “I’m tired of playing hostess in the shadows. I wanna try that Pho King pavilion so bad.”
“Later, babe,” Tripod snickered.
“Me, too,” Brogrom said, patting the leather-bound book. “This is getting to the point where we need someone with a true, overworld tactical mindset. We’re dealing with potential extra-dimensional creatures and people now.”
“And extra-dimensional business,” Cody added thoughtfully.
“Look at this,” Thiccolus suddenly interrupted, pointing a frantic finger at one of the lines of code on the main projection. “Someone’s actively trying to manipulate the engine. Look. The text isn’t cycling naturally; it's correcting back after attempted manual changes.”
Cody stepped closer, studying the line. He watched as a tiny blue blip kept reappearing in the exact same spot on the map, only to vanish a second later. “That’s Craig's turf. Look at where the portal coordinates are attempting to anchor.”
They all watched the tiny blue blip keep popping up just outside the snowy borders of Alwayswinter.
“What is that specific place, though?” Thiccolus tapped the location on his glass pad. “That’s way too far outside the town limits to just be Craig trying to get his return portal to Earth back.”
Cody watched the numbers cascade until he saw a highly familiar, chaotic pattern in the keystrokes. “What the fuck? That’s Mark.”
“How?” Glandalf tilted his head, his Wizard brain struggling to grasp the logic. “Why?”
“I think if we find out exactly what that location is,” Brogrom said, pushing a lock of silver hair behind his ear, “we will solve the why. As for the how? The only other access to this level of meta-tech in the world is sitting inside the Ritz Carlton.”
Cody narrowed his eyes. “He was supposed to infiltrate Craig's operation by getting caught. Who knows what that crazy motherfucker is actually doing in there.”
“How can you tell it's him?” Thiccolus wondered. “It’s just a standard hex editor, right?”
“He’s basically using Cheat Engine,” Cody sighed, recognizing the brute-force rhythm immediately. “Kinda. It's complicated. He’s testing all the random strings of code manually to find the right ones to force a spawn. If they don’t work, the engine naturally reverts them, which is what’s happening on the screen.”
“Why would anyone need that kind of program?” Tripod wondered, taking a shot of the Habushu.
“Hacking video games on Earth,” Cody replied. “It’s normally used to give yourself infinite gold and max levels.”
“Why wouldn’t he just do that for himself, then?” Chadriel wondered.
“Because you can’t hack real life,” Thiccolus responded quietly, the gravity of the situation settling in. “He’s hacking the Taser root file directly.”
“Yeah, if Mark could just get rich and hit level 100 that easily, he would have done it on day one,” Cody thought aloud. “But we need to find out what that specific location outside of Alwayswinter is.”
“Are we just blindly trusting him?” Glandalf cut in, his paranoia spiking. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. Sara might be a good manager, but this dude is sitting inside Craig’s home base and actively trying to give him a portal. I don’t trust him.”
“Let me tell you something about Mark,” Cody said, waving a half-eaten macaron in the air for emphasis. “Mark will voluntarily blow a Draggin before he turns on us. He might go full-ass chaotic villain for a while, but I have known that dude since I was ten years old. There’s a specific, highly-calculated reason if he’s doing this.”
“I don’t—” Glandalf started to argue.
“Enough,” Tripod stood up, putting his foot down as the BOH leader. “We’re going to go meet Sara and figure this out. As for what that spot is… Cody?”
“I got it,” Cody nodded, swallowing the pastry. “I’ll get over to Alwayswinter and find out what he's doing, while you guys head to the Forest of Nihilism.”
“Take Glanny with you,” Thiccolus suggested. “Even if you don’t need the magical firepower, you’ll certainly benefit from his teleportation and trash humor on the road.”
“Got it!” Cody agreed, jumping up eagerly—
“COCK! Goddammit!”
Character Name: Cody
Class: Jester 10
Race: Orange Maine Catfolk
Stats:
Strength: 10
Dexterity: 20
Constitution: 16
Intelligence: 20
Wisdom: 12
Charisma: 22