Meanwhile…

Having gone his whole life without luck ever breaking his way, Kurt was at a loss for how to respond to what was happening to him now. He’d spent a lot of time learning to live with disappointment, make the best of poor situations, and scramble to justify failed gambles after the fact.

In fact, he felt he had gotten good at turning his frowns upside-down.

Being in a voice call with a Conquest of Souls GM wasn’t something he ever expected. It wasn’t an impossibility that he might interact with one in-game - Kurt’s chronic bad luck made it feel expected to have to deal with the game’s internal discipline system sooner or later - talking to one over voice, especially as a friend, was the opposite of his expectations.

It seemed his talent for rolling with the punches didn’t transition quite so well into handling his good fortune as well.

“I just want to know what’s happening,” Kurt whined. “I’m not saying you gotta put me back in there, coach, but I’m so invested! It feels so unsatisfying to be on the outside and I’m not even allowed to look in!”

“Alric,” GM Dave said with an exasperated sigh, “I’m not sure what you want me to do. I am catching a lot of bullshit right now just to keep our boy alive. I barely had the attention span to spare to change that card draw to give him a straight flush so he could get the intel he needed to get on top of Ontario. I can keep you in the loop, but I can’t be constantly live-tweeting his rampage for you.” There was a tapping sound of the GM’s mechanical keyboard for a moment. “He killed Ontario and a few score of the officers. He jumped out of the tower with the High Jump Arcana to avoid fall damage, and now he’s murdering peons by the dozen to wait for the cooldown to come back around so he can High Jump the wall because they barred the front gate on him.”

“I mean, thanks,” Kurt grumbled, crossing his arms and slumping down in his seat. “But I want more than that. Is he using Royal Levin? How many people has he killed with Peppered Breath? Is he using Chilling Howl so that he can proc his new legendary pants for additional CDR?”

“Any other week, I’d be watching as close as you want and filling you in on all the grisly details,” GM Dave snapped. The clicking of his keyboard redoubled. “But I have to stop literally every crackpot who is out there suggesting that there’s more than one Merciless One.”

“It just feels like an e-sport, you know?” Kurt said, looking over at the commemorative poster from the first Shattered Core World Championships. “I just want it shoutcasted for an audience of thousands. Some of the shit he pulls off? People gotta see it. It was too cool to just be this weird one-off fluke that nobody is gonna think really happened.”

“I could try and set up a feed, I guess,” GM Dave said, heaving another sigh. “Hook it up to Hirrus’s tracker software. Displace it a set distance so that it’s a dramatic over-the-shoulder shot, you know.”

“You can do that?” Kurt asked quickly, sitting bolt upright fast enough that his headphones almost flew off his head. “Because I would stream the shit out of that. I’d have to cast it myself, which is obviously not what I want personally, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” GM Dave said, the clacking sound of his keyboard stopping dead. “You want to show people? Like… Right now? The thing I’m trying to keep a lid on, and you wanna just blast it to the rafters? Are you insane?”

“Not just him,” Kurt said. He tapped his chin. Gears were turning in his head, but they were going too slow for his mouth. Not a new sensation for him, but frustrating when he could see the outline of what was coming down the pipe. “I can take calls. Guests. Interviews. This isn’t just gonna be an event for entertainment. It’s activism, baby! We can change the world!”

“What the absolute fuck are you on about, Alric?” GM Dave demanded.

“The truth,” Kurt said. His brain was finally in gear and the surge of adrenaline was pushing him to do something reckless. “We show the world what’s happening. What he is. What they all are. They’re people, Dave! You know they are! And we can show the world. Just put a camera over his shoulder and the viewers will come. Put me on the call and I’ll tell them what’s going on under the hood of every NPC in the game.”

He rubbed his hands together eagerly. For the first time since he threw himself in front of the attack meant to sink Hirrus, he felt like Alric again. A boneheaded adventurer more interested in the right thing than the smart thing.

“You want the Shadow Council wrecked for what they’ve done to those people? That’s small potatoes. I want to take Fray to task for letting it happen. Hirrus saved my life and broke me out of the gameplay loop of getting it up the ass for no reason every week. I want to save him from the same thing.”

“You’re gonna get fucked up,” GM Dave said, but there was an uncertainty in his voice. “And I don’t just mean losing your account. I mean there’s gonna be a defamation suit. You’re going to court against a fucking megacorp, dude. Is this a hornet’s nest you really want to swing at?”

“Well behaved women rarely make history,” Kurt said with a grin.

“We’re fucking dudes,” GM Dave said flatly.

“Maybe you are,” Kurt said with a fake sniffle. “But I’m single right now.”

“I’m not- You’re-” GM Dave stammered for a moment and fell silent.

After a few seconds, the clacking of his keyboard came through the call again.

“Are you doing it?” Kurt asked, unable to contain his excitement.

“I’m thinking,” GM Dave said.

“So, hypothetically, if you were doing it,” Kurt began, putting on his most annoying wheedly voice, “would he have a UI? Could I see his absurd damage numbers? Health bars? I can get an artist friend to draft up some quick splash images and branding and shit, but I gotta talk to her like… five days ago, with a clear idea of what I’m gonna need.”

“I don’t know,” GM Dave snapped. “I know they’ve used NPC feeds for internal testing in the dev team, but I’ve never personally fucked with it. Nobody outside of the devs have physically seen it.”

“How do you know?” Kurt asked, trying to keep the pressure on. “Maybe you’re not the only troublemaker on the GM team. If you have the same access as the rest of the team, and you know that they have that capacity, maybe you know someone who has-”

“Because I’m the biggest fucking dumbass in the company,” GM Dave yelled. “Nobody from the inside has the fucking balls to do what I’m doing right now, let alone what I’ve done before this! I’m the king of the hill when it comes to risking his job for no fucking reason. I’ve got a box in the sky where I put suspected cheaters so that I can spawn a dragon on them. I’ve triggered high-tier RMs to soft enrage early just to see the nerds scramble. And right now I’m holding hundreds of unresolved GM tickets and praying my boss doesn’t notice so that an illicit cabal of assholes can get fucked hard by a lunatic code fluke.” There was a hard pounding of a fist on a desk. “Nobody. Does. What. I. Do. Because every one of them has an entire fucking brain and I’m the misfit idiot who doesn’t belong here.”

After the outburst, silence stretched between them for a long moment. Kurt was stunned, and GM Dave had clearly needed to get that off his chest. It felt like a full minute passed before GM Dave’s keyboard started clacking again.

“Holy shit, dude,” Kurt said quietly. “Are you okay?”

“I hate my fucking job, okay?” GM Dave grumbled quietly. “There. I said it. I have everyone’s dream job suckling at Fray’s tit in front of a videogame all day, and I fucking hate it. I didn’t last week! I was having a fucking ball. But now I know I’m… I’m a fucking stormtrooper. I’m a stormtrooper and my job is reliant on virtual slave labor and I haven’t slept in four days because whenever I close my eyes I see their faces.”

“Hey, man, chill out, okay?” Kurt said, trying to sound soothing. “If this goes right, you’re probably not gonna have the job for much longer. Does that make you feel better?”

GM Dave snorted a laugh. “You think you’re gonna show the world that the NPCs in Conquest of Souls are people and the whole company is going to collapse instantly?”

“No,” Kurt said with a grin. “I think I’m gonna show the world that the NPCs are people and the company is gonna come apart slowly over the next ten years, but your ass is getting fired exactly two seconds after they figure out that the call came from inside the house.”

GM Dave was quiet for a while, though his keyboard kept click-clacking.

“I’ll loop you in on a test feed in the morning,” GM Dave said eventually. “It’ll take a few hours after that to shake the kinks out of it so that it’s ready for an audience, so don’t start streaming right then. But I’ll be in touch if there’s any issues.”

“I gotta make some calls anyway,” Kurt said, his grin redoubling. “My ex from college was big into the AI rights thing. She might have some connections.”

“I’m going to send you my sister’s number,” GM Dave said, but his tone was suddenly sharp when he said: “you are not going to interview her or my niece. If I hear either of their voices on the stream I am going to mail an incendiary device to the billing address on your account.” His voice grew softer. “But they will absolutely have connections.”

“Great,” Kurt said, looking around to try and figure out where he put his phone. “Just a couple leads is all I needs.”

“This is going to be big,” GM Dave said quietly. “Clips are going to be on every gaming news site in the world fifteen minutes after you start. Maybe even mainstream news outlets by the end of tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, suddenly feeling both very big and very small at the same time.

“So do the world a favor and get a better mic,” GM Dave said, with an obvious smile in his voice. “You sound like a 90-year-old chain-smoking grandma at the bottom of a well with terrible acoustics.”

“Ex-fucking-scuse you,” Kurt said, putting a hand to his chest in mock-offense, even though GM Dave couldn’t see him. “My well has extraordinary acoustics, philistine."