Mr Cao, perhaps we could visit the wake of the deceased after they have finished the autopsy. We’ll only go if the report is favorable to us. Regards.> I sent the message to Mr. Cao through my phone connected to the JYE pod. This compatibility with all sorts of gadgets was one of the main selling points of the pod. I supposed Mr. Cao understands why we should go to the wake only if it was confirmed that our product did not kill that guy. I hope he does. Most people don't get my train of thought.

I could already see the headlines. A corporation with a heart. Damn, that would be one fine headline. And we wouldn’t even pay anyone for it. I think we could pay for the funeral. The friends of the deceased reporter would print the story themselves. The gaming community would pick up on that and they would be the ones to spread it.

This might sound like I was helping the company on something that wasn’t connected with my job. Because this looked a lot like advertising. But this has a lot to do with my job. I have learned a lot when I was a young lawyer assisting the senior partners of the law firm I used to work for handle the Grae’s WeeCees recall.

Perhaps, this was the new problem that products would tackle as we enter the age of implants. No one in their right mind would blame a toaster for some bodily ailments; but then again, there were many people not in their right mind.

But if there was a hint of a defective gadget that connected to your body, people would immediately associate any pain or illness they felt with it. The Grae’s WeeCees recall was a nightmare. There were even groups calling for the government to stop bodily invasive technologies. Other groups raised the concerns that the implants would soon blur the lines between machines and humans. I was sure that if there was even a hint that our pod was the cause of death, people would protest saying that the machines were trying to fry our brain or something.

What drugs are these people taking?

So, I was just doing my job, taking steps to make sure that we wouldn’t be in that situation. I doubt if the people in the corporation would understand what I was doing; perhaps they would just assume I was being proactive and helpful. I wasn’t even required to go here to Mervell. And if this was all resolved, they wouldn’t even know what I did for them. In doing these things, I should also make sure not to make people around me feel like I was taking their job. Mrs. Alabaster, for example, as head of the advertising department, might be miffed that I was trying to make this into positive publicity for the company and impinging on her job. Nah, she won't think that. I was an expert on making people like me and not feel threatened by me.

If you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all. One of my favorite quotes. I think it came from a cartoon version of God. One of those ancient cartoons. Everything we have now were animated enviro-projections.

Anyway, that was why I always say that even though my clients pay me tons of money, they’re actually paying me at a discount.

Right now, I was playing, and no, I was not getting paid to play a game. I still play anyway. And, technically, I was being paid for this time. This was nearly on the same level of pooping while working because you were technically getting paid while pooping.

“Is that your girlfriend?” Justalyne said. A level twenty-three Forager. That probably explained all the vines she had on her armor. Some kind of additional protection? She said, “You seem really serious sending that message.”

“Nah, it’s just my mum getting worried about that recent news about that…uh…pod malfunction thing, I guess?” I said that to elicit opinions from them about the incident. I browsed some player ran forums yesterday before I left and there was no mention about it. But that was yesterday, so some things might have changed. I also mentioned contacting my mother so that they’ll automatically think I was a nice person.

I don’t know why but people just assume you’re a nice person if you took time off from what you were doing, playing Nornyr in my present case, and contacting your parents and talking about safety or health, things like that.

“You’re talking about the one in Pleudor? It’s all over the net,” Mephistopheles056, a level twenty blacksmith said. “Those people saying it’s the VR pod malfunctioning are nuts. I mean, it’s so obvious that it’s a spinal port issue.” He won’t on to drone about spinal ports. Maybe he really knew about them or he simply read stuff from the internet and became an instant expert.

So, we’re not from the same country. He referred to the incident as ‘in Pleudor’ referring to my country, instead of ‘in Mervell.’ I tilted my head. So, the news was already spreading. I hoped that the police report came out quickly enough. “No way JYE corp would mess up that bad. And why would you die from connecting to the pod. It’s not like the port could transmit electricity,” I said in a confident tone. "And it doesn't sound like it exploded or anything."

“Yeah, that was what I was thinking too.” He leaned in and said, “I really think that this was a setup or something. Someone killed that guy.”

“Oh, come on,” Justalyne said. “Conspiracy theories again. Sheesh.”

“Maybe he discovered something that wasn’t meant to be discovered. Maybe something connected to those sketchy things in this game.”

“What things?” I was genuinely curious.

“Listen to this. There are some stories that bad people, like hitmen, guys like that, dangerous guys, use the game for business. If you know how to meet them, you can do business with them in the game. With all the insane police AI monitoring the internet, they said that illegal transactions shifted to other means of communication.”

"Like this game?"

“Ssshhh. Stop. Just stop with all that. Why the hell would a hitman play this game just to talk with clients?” Justalyne inhaled deeply and placed her hands on her hips with so much force that all the bottles hanging on her jingled. “If ChilliMaster was here, you wouldn’t go on about those theories of yours.”

“But that reporter was really investigating things in the game. And the hitman theory fits the murder! Maybe he found out something he shouldn't?" Mephisto said enthusiastically. "The reporter even has a blog."

“Filled with conspiracy theories.”

“Who’s ChilliMaster?” I interjected. There was no point to them arguing with each other. I couldn’t learn about the game if they just talk with each other. But I tucked that info that the guy who died has a blog which meant that many people would miss him and might spread false information about our pod killing people. Shit, a conspiracy theory blog.

One would think that I would love having lawsuits filed against the corporation because I was a lawyer. But I was the general counsel of the corporation. If lawsuits were filed all over the world, the corporation would have to hire local law firms to repel them. So, no money for me. Well, I would probably get productivity bonus and other stuff because of the added work. But I would have more work if that happened. And I didn’t want to deal with fellow dicks around the world. And I wanted to play the game. Emphasis on the last reason.

“ChilliMaster is our friend who got us into playing Mardukryons. Probably the third strongest player around here even though he’s a miner. Anyway, I was actually an amphir, some cute furry beast, before I switched over. Looks like a brown koala. Forest kingdom, quite a primitive race.” Justalyne said. “People quickly left the starting village and went to the human empire nearby for more interaction. No one wanted to join me in amphir quests.”

“I was just a simple dwarf in the biggest dwarven kingdom in this game. There were too many people there, annoying,” Mephisto said.

“ChilliMaster told us to change over to Mardukryons. He was one of the first Mardukryon players and so he was already pretty strong when we changed our race.”

“So that’s why those other guys in the Hunter-Warriors place didn’t want to pick a fight with you,” I said.

“When we try to pass the Ice Tunnel, normal players like us would need the help of the strong ones. Like ChilliMaster. And Mardukryon players have a rule to help each other. We only have each other here and we can’t even get down this stupid mountain,” Mephisto said.

“Enough talk,” Justalyne said. “Let’s charge towards the place where there are crystaminds.”

When we accepted the quest as a party, the location showed up in our minimaps. Well, not exactly on the minimap. It was outside of the minimap with an arrow pointing to it. Justalyne gave us speed potions so that we could run faster to it.

“We’re here,” Justalyne said.

“Finally,” I said. We were about fifteen minutes from the village. And that was with charging all along the way with the speed potions. We didn’t stop to kill anything but simply outrun all the monsters. None of them gave a chase and we didn’t meet the Lord Mirdabon.

While the place of the quest was quite far from the village, running extremely fast on four legs was an enjoyable experience. Our hooves were specially adapted to running over rocks and other obstacles, something akin to the hooves of the mountain goats. Those guys could climb the steepest cliffs, almost climbing vertically. While I doubt that we could do that, we were capable of more feats of agility than the normal horse.

The cold wind, although it didn’t really feel that cold, whipping back the fur of my lower body while a light cover of snow coats my upper chest as we zipped through the gigantic tangled roots of magical trees and the dangerous rocky cliffs of the mountain was thrilling, to say the least.

It was almost addicting. I could probably run like that all day and would be happy with my time spent.

“Those are the crystaminds,” Mephisto said. “This is your first time seeing them, right?”

They were four feet tall, six-legged creatures that looked like blue ferrets. The notable thing about them was that they had something like a crystal helmet. Or not. It actually looked like they had an exposed crystal skull. I focused my [Hunter's Instinct] at one of them.

Increased speed when allies die

Cold resistance

With those scampers averaging level fifteen, I was sure that I couldn’t have completed this quest on my own. Can we even do this with just the three of us? There was about a twenty crystaminds milling about a large snow hive of some sort. There were tunnels all over the hive, with crystaminds popping in and out all the time.

Justalyne said, “The crystal loot they drop is needed for the basic potion bottles. They’re even ingredients for making the higher tier bottles. I have to let the mixtures I have stay in the bottles for a while before I can use them. Maybe it has some magical properties to ferment the mixture?”

“Why don’t just people go here and kill them? That sounds less of a hassle than waiting for a request. And we have to give some of the loot we recover here to the Hunter-Warriors, right?”

“These little crystamind communities only spawn when there’s a request. But the crystaminds can spawn individually here and there even without a request. Rarely happens, though.”

“You can be a dick and follow people who got the request and try to steal kills from them,” Mephisto said. “But, one, you’re a dick; two, the one holding the request would get priority on the loot so good luck trying to get those even if you do kill a crystamind; and three, people will hate you. It’s not good to be hated up here. We need each other if we want to survive the Ice Tunnel.” He shrugged. “Not that I’ve been in the Ice Tunnel. It’s just that ChilliMaster said it’s really hard.”

“So that’s why. But we need to give some of the loot to the Hunter-Warriors?” I said.

“Yep. It’s not too bad though. We get to keep the rest. And these crystaminds don’t get spawned without a request. The higher-level guys who have money to spare put up requests so that the benefits would be multiplied. They get their stuff. We get stuff plus the XP from the monsters killed and the quest itself and all the extra loot.”

“Most of the time, NPCs are the one who make the request though. Since most people don’t have money to spare,” Justalyne said. She patted the bottles that hung off her. “Both ChilliMaster and I use bottles. He’s a Healer but focused on the attack part of the skill tree so he’s very strong even on his own.”

“So, let’s get killing?” Mephisto said. “Can we even kill these guys the way we normally do?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I actually don’t know how we’ll go about this.” Justalyne sheepishly scratched her head. She then stuck her tongue out. Apparently, we had a violet tongue. “ChilliMaster gave us the money to put up the request for crystamind loot because he can’t play with us right now, but we ended up taking the quest ourselves because we wanted to help you.”

Oh, I’m so touched, I thought sarcastically. “You mean you can’t them all on with just the two of you.”

“Of course, we can,” Mephisto said with a hint of pride.

“It’s just that we’ll use up a lot of potions for this.” Justalyne raised her hands and typed in the air. Then she swiped her hands as if she was scrolling through an interface. She was probably checking her inventory. “I have lots of potions so that won’t be a problem.”

“The problem is that we’ll probably use up more potions than the crystamind loot we get to make more potions,” Mephisto said. “But it’s fine with us. We'll just have to be very careful. We'll run around their hive and draw a few at a time. When the whole pack gets alerted, we'll keep our distance until they go back to their home and then we'll resume picking off a few at a time.”

Aw, they’re nice people. “I’ll try to pay you back when I have enough money,” I said with fake sincerity, obviously. The fakeness was with regards to paying them back because I appreciated their help. But I was serious in paying them if they wanted to because I didn’t want to be indebted to people. "How do you usually kill them, anyway?"

"ChilliMaster wouldn't die even if all of them went for him. He has life leech, plus the insane heals and buffs of his own healer class," Mephisto said. "I also add in my buffs, added armor and added accuracy. These guys actually have above average evasion even though you can't see it with your Hunter's Instinct because of its low level."

"I would chuck some basic poison potions and flame bottle bombs down their tunnels just to get them out. Lower their life and defenses when they meet ChilliMaster. I could also use my potions to heal ChilliMaster, but he doesn't need that," Justalyne said. "And I spread my seeds." She looked at my puzzled face and explained, "It's a skill of mine. I really scatter a couple of seeds around ChilliMaster. Some small heal and slows down the crystaminds. When lots of them die the rest speed up insanely. It's really annoying to chase them."

"ChilliMaster could just stand in front of their hive and kill them all," Mephisto said with a laugh.

"Hmmm. Can we scout around the area first? I think we could make this work."

"What will be looking for?"

"Some sort of place we can funnel them down. A small pass or something." I then asked Justalyne. "Do you have something that will keep the crystaminds on me? So that they won't go after you guys."

"You want to tank them? I have something for that. That's one of the main selling points of the Forager faction."

"Yup. And do you also have some stronger poison potions that you could spare."

"Poison potions make a poisonous gas cloud over an area. It's useless to throw the stronger ones in the hive because they'll get out anyway. I just use some basic ones to draw them out."

I smiled. "You won't be throwing it down the tunnels. You'll be throwing them at me. I think I have a plan that might work."