Four hours after leaving the forest found Gordo sitting at a table in the Broken Sword, his feet propped up on the edge of the table, a leather mug gripped in one hand, watching the other players around him eat and drink, their chatter filling the air. He had spent most of the gold he had discovered soon after returning to the city, joining the Sword Masters Guild, accepting this as one of his four classes, then purchased the small arms skill for himself. He would have stayed there for some training, but didn’t have enough gold left after he had paid for both. He took a look at his pouch to tally the remaining funds he had and saw that it was five gold, seven silver and twenty three coppers. Not too bad, he thought to himself.

The small arms skill would allow him to use his dagger better, he knew, but he would purchase better skills as he managed to improve his financial situation. Another thing he knew he needed to do, when the money became available, was to transfer some out to his game account and purchase the game add-ons which would allow him to use the Automap and Auction House, as well as giving him access to the internal game wiki. That would cost him ten dollars, or one hundred gold, taking into consideration the ten for one exchange rate in money withdrawal. He could get this money selling those unidentified items, but he was curious to find out what they were, as well as what they could do. That was a decision for a later date.

A ping of an incoming message disturbed his thoughts, and he opens his inbox to find out what had arrived. Seeing the message, he slapped himself on his forehead, cursing his forgetfulness, for it was another message from the same person as the previous one, the message he had totally forgotten about. Well, he had time now, he decided, and selected the first message.

Gordo

Been round your place a couple of times, but your place is all locked up. I know you told me you were going to be away for a while, but thought you would have returned by this time.

Was going to tell you I managed to save the money for the equipment, and purchased the suit. Imagine my surprise when I joined and found a character called Gordo already in the game. I hope this is you, Gordon, and not some random person using the same name. Also, imagine my surprise as well, when I found out I was higher on the players leaderboard than you. Yay, go team Tim.

If I am talking to the right person, I chose a Cleric character, and am currently at level nine. If you want to see if we can team up, ingame message me, my character’s name is Dryce and I am currently in a city called Riversfall. Dunno where that is compared to you.

Whatever, just send me a message anyway.

P.S. Christ, this game is so real, I still cant believe it.

Tim. a.k.a Dryce

Gordo smiled, that was just like Tim, always enthusiastic, and so forgetful. From what he said in the message, it indicated he didn’t remember to transport his character across from the old game for he would be more than level nine if he had done that. He then selected the second message from Tim.

Gordo

Still no reply from you, either your offline a lot, which would explain your dismal performance, or you’re not Gordon, which also would explain said dismal performance. If it is you, just message me, if not, message me as well to let me know and I will stop messaging. Gotta go, I have a party to join and search some tower ruins.

Tim

A tap on his shoulder surprised him, making him jump and drop his feet to the ground. He looked up to see who it was that had disturbed him, only to see two familiar faces looking down at him. Well, only one was looking down at him, for the other was short enough his face was at about equal height with Gordo’s head. Placing his mug down to the table, he rose to his feet, facing them. It was the two brothers, Shan and Garal, he liked the brothers, but his last meeting with them, in this very same bar, hadn’t ended that well. It was mostly his fault, for he shouldn’t have looked them up to basically beg off them for a chance to earn experience, he knew he was a far better player than that and shouldn’t have done it. He was about to make an excuse and take his leave when he noticed they both had wide smiles plastered on their faces. Confused, he just scowled at them. “What ?” he asked them in puzzlement.

“You.” Spoke Shan. “You ARE the real Gordo. We checked out your account, just like you asked us to, and boy were we gob smacked when the character turned out to be exactly what you told us it would be.” He shook his head. “Garal didn’t want to access the account at first, and said we should just forget about you, but I managed to change his mind in the end… “ he paused here a second before continuing, “So let’s just say we apologize for the way we treated you yesterday.” He held out a hand, his expression hopeful.

Gordo just laughed, then gripped it, slapping the dwarf on the back with his other hand. “No problems, it was lame how I talked to you, asking for assistance. I wouldn’t have even believed myself, if that was said to me.” The memory of how he had acted even making him shake his own head. “Ah, well, forget about it. Here, take a seat and have a drink with me.” He pulled out a chair, then caught the attention of the barkeep, lifted three fingers up and pointed at his table, indicating he would like a round for all of them. The barkeep gave a nod and called one of the waitresses over, filling mugs as he did so.

While they were making themselves comfortable, something he was thinking about before they had arrived made him ask abruptly. “Hey, we are in Angelwood, aren’t we ?” They nodded in surprised affirmation at this question, so he continued. “Has either of you heard of Riversfall, or where it is from here ?” Both of them started to stare vacantly into empty air, their fingers twitching about as if they were manipulating something. This performance baffled him, before understanding struck him, they were looking at their personal game maps and the forums . As they continued with their mime act, the waitress arrived, plonking three mugs down onto the table, picked up the empty one and gave Gordo a smile as she left. It might have been his imagination, but for a second there he thought he had seen her wink at him. He turned in his chair, but only saw the back of her as she returned to the bar. Nah, he thought to himself, impossible, for she was one of the untouchables.

It took the brother a few minutes to finish their search and their attention returned back to him, Shan shaking his head. “No, nothing. I cant find any information on a place called Riversfall, not surprising, really, considering this game is less than two weeks old.” He turned to his brother, who sat there, running his fingers slowly through his long beard, a pensive look on his face. “What about you Garal, you find anything ?”

“Umm… sort of, nothing really informative. There is a list of player starting areas posted in the forums, and Riversfall is on that list. Doesn’t say where it is, just that it is a starting city. There are hundreds of starting zones on that list, so it could be anything from a thousand miles away to six thousand.” He them grinned cheekily at the other two. “I did find out that the game map has grown, though, it now covers 225 million square miles. That almost doubles the playing area we had at the beginning. That also means this world is flat.”

Gordo and Shan just stare at him, wondering what the hell he was going on about. “Just ignore him, Gordo, he always babbles on about useless things and facts. Getting back to the important things, why the hell do you want to know about this Riversfall place?”

“No reason really, its just a friend of mine has started there, and I was just wondering whether we could somehow meet and create our own party. Suppose that another thing I will have to put off for now, or until I find out more about its location.”

“So,” Shan interjected, looking Gordo up and down “I see you have improved yourself since yesterday. Level four and armed and armored, I see, and what is this Omniclast thingie you have as your class ? Never heard of an Omniclast, is it something new ?”

Gordo decided to downplay his response, knowing the admins wouldn’t appreciate it if he spilled the beans about it at this point, plus it would avoid all those other difficult, and inevitable, questions that would follow. “New ? Nah, not really, its just a rebranding of the dual class characters to make them sound more interesting, but at the end of the day, your still just the standard Swordmage or Clerical Bard.” He wasn’t going to tell them it was much, much more than dual class. “ Nothing special, really. ” He sat back and took a pull at his mug of ale, carefully watching their reaction to his comments. From what he could see, their interest waned on being informed it was only a name change, rather than something completely new.

Garal finally joined in on the conversation. “You asked us for help yesterday, but why didn’t you ask any of your friends from the other game ? You must have been on good terms with most of the top one hundred players before you left. “

Gordo shook his head. “Nah, didn’t even consider that. I wouldn’t consider calling them friends, and anyway, most of them were just dicks. If they had ported their characters across to here, then they still would be the same arrogant dicks they always were.” Gordo paused, thinking a moment. “I suppose if I had ported my strong character across, I would be a real dick as well. “

“You never told us why you didn’t port your character. Why didn’t you ?” asked Shan

Another difficult question, Gordo thought, but was thankful he already had a prepared answer for exactly this question. “Couldn’t. My character was created in the beta version, and the coding couldn’t be adapted to this game, well, it could but I would have to wait until they had done that, and that would have taken a couple of weeks. I’m an impatient person, so I just decided to start off from the beginning again, not realizing how bad it would be.” He gave them a quick smile. “But things are looking up now, so it wasn’t a bad choice in the end.” He took another swig from the mug watching them nod an affirmation in unison, his grin hidden behind the mug at his lips. The twins seemed to have bought into his lie.

“Anyway,” Garal started, “after we had looked at your old character, we came online to look for you, but couldn’t find you, so went out exploring the forest. It wasn’t long before we found a goblin encampment hidden away in there. They have set up the camp inside some caves and it was just luck that let us see the guards they have posted at the caves entrance before they noticed us. It’s pretty damn hard to see the little green buggers against the greenery of the forest. There are no posts in the forums mentioning them so I think we are the first players to come across them. The loot is so much better the first time a dungeon is completed.”

The mention of the forest, and caves, made Gordo remember something he had overheard, “When you were looking at this dungeon, you didn’t happen to notice the name of it, did you ? Was it the Green Forest Caverns by any chance ?”

The other two just looked at him, mouth agape. “Why, yes, it was called the Green Forest Cavern. How the hell did you know that, no one else knows that name, and it’s not mentioned in any of the forums either.” Shan spoke in amazement, still stunned by Gordo’s knowledge of this event site. His amazement changed to disappointment. “If you have heard of it, then we are not the first players to encounter this place. Damn.”

“Now hold on a minute.” exclaimed Gordo. “That’s not necessarily true. I only know this place because I overheard the name from an NPC, not from a player. These caves could still be in pristine condition.”

Shan seemed to cheer up a bit at this. “That’s true, what exactly did you overhear, Gordo. ?”

He rubbed his cheek in thought. “I only heard a voice, and it made some remark along the lines of ‘The gardener thinks a settlement stone is in the Green Forest Caverns’. I have no idea what this stone they are talking about is, nor what its for, but that’s about all I heard, the rest I couldn’t hear because too many people were talking.” He scratched his chin, the bristles on them making a slight crackling sound as his fingernails passed across them. He hadn’t noticed this growth before, distracting his attention away from the brothers by this discovery. He looked up just in time to see the twins gleefully fist bumping each otherr. ‘Umm.. what’s got you two so excited ?”

“A settlement stone, Gordo, a settlement stone.” Garal replied in an excitement, before staring dumfounded at the blank expression he received from this statement. “You do know what a settlement stone is, don’t you ?”

With a shake of his head, Gordo relied “Nope, never heard of it, is it something important ?”

Shan gave a short bark of laughter at this, thinking Gordo was joking before realizing he really didn’t know what they were talking about. “You don’t know, do you ? You really have no idea.” He could only shake his head at the astonishing fact that there was a player this ignorant in regard to one of the most desired items in the game. Then he took pity on seeing the total bafflement on Gordo’s face and explained. “Settlement stones are items that allow a player to create their own kingdoms, and are extremely rare and valuable. To locate one this early in the game is like finding hens teeth, which is to say it virtually never happens. There are six types of stones, with all six needed to create a kingdom. If the stone is the first stone, it could attract a price around one hundred thousand gold, that’s ten thousand real dollars, Gordo, and that is the least valuable of the stones. Players would kill us just to gain control of this. Now do you see ?”

Gordo eyes were wide open by this time, with interest and fascination. As one of his tasks was to create his own kingdom, this information was invaluable to him. “Wow… that’s just unbelievable. What do these stones look like ?”

“No one knows, Gordo, because none have been found yet, or if they have, no one had announced finding one. There are none in the auction house, nor any description in the forums. If there is one in these caverns, and we find it, we will definitely be keeping that fact to ourselves.” Garal spoke quietly, but just as excited as his brother. “Let’s keep our voices down from now on, I don’t think anyone has overheard us, yet, and I definitely don’t want this known by anyone else but us. Thanks for the information, Gordo, I hope you will also keep the secret, in fact, to make sure you have an incentive to do so, I think you should join us on this dungeon. Are you in with us ?” he looked at Gordo eagerly, and sat back in satisfaction when he received Gordo;s nod of acceptance. “Its getting late, today, so we will leave the dungeon for tomorrow. Meet you here. bright and early ?”

“Sure, I will be here.” Gordo replied. “See you tomorrow.” The twins faded away as they signed out of the game. Finishing off his mug, Gordo sighed, then opened up his message box to answer Tim.