The other seven members of his PUG showed up as expected, 10 minutes after him. They entered the raid dungeon in a group, with the two tankers up front, the ranged dps in the middle and the healers at the back. The “cave” was about wide enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder. When you started a raid in this game you were given an option to chose the difficulty, from 1 to 5 stars. However, 30 years ago, no one called it by the star rating, they called it “Weak, Normal, Tough, Hard, Elite”. Despite what might make sense, normal “toughness” was 2 star because that was the default difficulty for a Raid. Some raids were impossible on ELITE with a PUG (Pick up Group, or a RAID with randos), however if you wanted the most and best loot drops you needed to run them on Elite, same for the accolades. Not all raids gave you an accolade that adjusted your stats (some gave titles), but they all gave an accolade if you cleared it on Elite. The result is the number of accolades you could find in this game probably numbered over a million.

When he played the game 30 years ago he didn’t become interested in Accolades until he was level 1000, and he saw how much you could strengthen your character with them. He wasn’t planning on going out of his way to collect accolades, but he wouldn’t avoid collecting them either. Because once he was level 1000 he’d have to go around seeking the damned things out anyway, and it was simply better to gather them as you leveled up. There were larger raids then 8 person, but 8 people was the limit on party size, so if you wanted to run a larger raid, you would have one party with 8 people, and those would be the captains for the 8 parties (max size for a raid was 64 people).

The party made its way down the cavern without incident, until they ran into the first mobs, groups of foes (in this case bandit raiders were their names), each group was made up of 14 foes, and in thie passageway it appeared that 3 such groups instantly got agroed on their group. Eztli didn’t wait for the tankers to start taunting, he started getting ready to cast a curse which he unlocked; it was one of his favorite curses for raids and PVP called “Bad Luck is Contagious.”

Bad Luck is Contagious: Continuous single target, AOE curse. Target is cursed with “bad luck”, all attack damage dealt by target is min possible, cannot crit with any skills, magic or attack, all damage done to target is maximum possible value, any attack which can result in a critical attack, will. Affects all of targets “allies” within 5m of target with the same curse. Target may be anyone within line of sight from caster. Does not count as an attack, nor will it generate aggression in battle. COST: 100MP/SEC

Waving the wand about Eztli quickly cast blood field and blood casting, then cast bad luck is contagious on the strongest looking foe in the mob. The mob of 14 was made up of Lieutenant class foes with 3 sub boss level commanders. All enemies in a raid typically had x3 the HPs a normal mob at it’s level would have, and all lieutenant class typically have x2 the attack power and hp of a normal mob, where as sub bosses were x3. Meaning each of these foes had well over 100,000 hps. It might seem hopeless, at least Eztli would be crushed by a mob of 14 lieutenant and sub boss class raid mobs, but that was why he brought the template build tankers. Template Tankers in this game lived up to their name, a properly build tank in this game could take the agro of all 3 of those groups and with minimal healing support, assuming they weren’t debuffed by something, survive indefinitely. These mobs didn’t debuff, so this group would be fine with one tanker. However Template Tankers usually had a couple of weaknesses. One their damage output was nonsensically low, two their taunts could only affect 14 foes at a time. Meaning in a situation like this one, one tanker couldn’t hold the agro of all 3 groups by himself. A skilled tanker could keep the attention of the mobs he needed to, but with this being a PUG, he didn’t want to risk it and so went with 2 even though it was going to hurt their clear time in this raid.

The two tankers did their job and made a human wall the raging mobs couldn’t pass. While the DPS rained as much AOE damage as they could on the heads of the mobs. With 42 foes packed into a tight space most of the foes were taking splash damage from the AOE attacks. Within seconds the hit points of the Lieutenant class mobs had sunk into the red, and soon they started to die. What little damage Eztli had done to himself with the blood casting, returned 8-fold in seconds, keeping his life and mana filled as if he hadn’t cast a thing. When the sub-boss he tagged with the curse appeared to be on the edge of dying, he shifted targets to another sub-boss and continued the debuff.

It took less then 3 minutes to clear out the three mobs, and Eztli could see the confidence on their faces. “Ok, well done, we’ll do it just like that. DPS if it looks like the tankers didn’t pull enough mobs into the ball, just pull another mob on your own, as you can see the healers can keep up just fine, and these passageways will keep us from getting overwhelmed.” Eztli spoke to the team. Motivated they all moved forward quickly, they all had seen the huge XP they had gotten and were eager to pillage this place for all it was worth.

It was an uneventful 40 minutes later the group arrived in the boss room. The most exciting thing that happened was one of the tankers tripped and the mobs almost got to the ranged DPS however the fallen tanker’s taunt still worked so he was able to keep the agro on him, and off the dps, so nothing really happened as a result. The boss fight was moderately uneventful. The Tzitzimitl was basically a skeleton in a kilt. It had some powerful attacks and the tankers almost bit it a couple of times until the healers figured out it’s attack patterns and times their strongest heals for when the Tzitzimitl performed his strongest attacks. It took almost 20 minutes to kill the boss, and the party was transported outside the cave, with Eztli gaining 2 levels and everyone else gaining 3-5, plus an Accolade: ‘Doesn’t Fear the Reaper’ which granted a cosmetic title that reads the same

They held a party auction for the items found, there were two gold ranked items (item quality runs from white (poor), green, blue, red, copper, silver, gold, purple), however both were not appropriate for Eztli’s skills and so he passed on them; instead he ended up with a silver “quality’ belt (that granted +100 armor and +20 CON) and a ring (+100 Wisdom). With the spoils split, Eztli told the crew he was going to do the raid again, 5 of the party stayed on for it, and he quickly filled the missing bodies with new players, and repeated the run.

This went on all day, each run taking about an hour, and about 20 minutes between. After 7 of these runs Eztli was equipped head to toe with silver ranked equipment, nothing impressive, but since he didn’t particularly care about equipment until he reached later levels; his playstyle was definitely not dependent on items, he figured it would give him a nice margin of error and help speed up his leveling a bit. He also had gained 9 levels in the 7 runs, ending up at level 76, which was enough to swap over to a new raid. He just didn’t feel like running another raid right now, so instead he logged out to make dinner for Bliss and see what was happening in the world. While working on dinner, he flipped on the 3DP (3d projector) and switched to a popular news channel.

Unsurprisingly the news was meaningless, basically all it talked about were fever games, reminding him why he didn’t watch the news in the first place. Ever since the world government took over the news reported meaningless pap, and next to nothing about the things going on with the government or other areas of the world. For example, currently there was some mindlessly cute woman rambling about whether or not Underworld was desensitizing people to human misery. Mark laughed at that thought. The world just went through a more then a decade long war, in which half the major population centers were nuked or straight genocided, and the world population took a dive from 9 billion to 3 billion. The idea that human life could hold much value in such a world was laughable. Of course, she was pretty and worked for the state so she got paid to ask nonsensical questions like that. Even better, he knew, since the state had approved Underworld her question could be seen in certain lights as criticism of the state. So, he knew she wouldn’t actually “conclude” that Underworld was dangerous no matter how provocative the question, the “news” she would report would end up promoting underworld for some reason or other.

Not that he minded the obvious promotion piece; the bigger Underworld got, the more likely it was he could finally turn around the shit pile that was his life, and his girl’s life.

“Nice job Lizzie!”

Elizabeth Garren, the “mindlessly cute” tv reporter Mark had just been mocking before changing the channel winced at the mindless compliment from the equally brainless hairdresser. 28 years old and on a mission, she slipped away from the news desk heading toward the station manager’s office, she had seen the look on his face during her broadcast and knew she couldn’t ignore him this time.

“Fucking hell Garren!” The suited company man shouted at her “I don’t care what the rest of your piece said, you’re questioning the government with that opening question. You can’t do that if you want to have a job!”

“I thought it was a gripping opener, besides, the piece was a blowjob to Underworld, and the regulators who approved it.” Lizzie replied with a tired voice.

“I said I don’t care how the rest of the report went, you CANT question the government like that.”

“Listen…” she thought a moment trying to recall this scarecrow’s first name, she never forgot a first name, which was an important skill as a news reporter, of course being a news reporter didn’t quite mean what it used to mean. “Jim” she recalled it suddenly, “you and I know this game contains content the government is purportedly against. For Christ sakes did you see those videos of the endless human sacrificing going on in the Aztec cities? How is that inclusive? Doesn’t that create a negative stereotype about people?”

“Garren…” he growled in warning glancing at the walls

“I’m not saying anything the government wouldn’t agree with. However this time the government approved this title for play, why? To dope the masses with something to entertain them so they don’t act up like they are in”

“GARREN!”

“Right right, anyway you and I know what this is about. Aren’t you tired of reading the news the government sends us to report? Wouldn’t you like to do some sort of reporting?”

“I better like where this is going.”

“How about I look into some things with Underworld. I’ll make sure nothing goes on air without yours and the government’s approval, what do you say?”

“NOTHING on air without gold plated approval” Jim replied

“Good, you’ll like it, trust me.” Lizzie knew he’d love it, she just needed to figure out what it was. However, the longer she could keep the boss in the dark the better it was for her. At least she wouldn’t need to read any more press releases from the government as if it’s news for a while. And if she got something, she could air, all the better. These “fever” games were destroying humanity, and the quicker she could prove it the better everyone else will be. The problem she was facing was the government seemed content with using these games to keep down unrest.

“It will have to be pre-recorded and censored before airing. You know I can’t just write a blank check on this type of investigation.” Jim temporized.

“you won’t regret it Jim.” Lizzie left the office feeling better about her job then at any point in time in the last few years. Her first call was to Leo, if there was anything, she wanted to know about Fever gaming or underworld, the president of LM_STARS was the best place to go.