“So we’re heading into town then?” Kris asked.

“Seems like as good an idea as any,” I said.

“Yeah, until we run into those assholes and more of their friends,” Kris grumbled.

“But we’ll be in a town where presumably there’ll be guards to keep them from fucking with us,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Kris asked. “So will a bunch of goblin guards save our asses? Remember that place is under new management.”

I frowned. “Well at the very least we need to check the place out so we can figure out how to get to another town where these assholes aren’t running things. They might’ve taken one town, but it’s not like they can take over the whole game world.”

“Maybe,” Kris said, sounding like she thought that was very much a possibility. She turned and heading for the edge of the clearing. “The disembodied hottie’s voice said we need to go west and we’ll hit the town, so I vote we go west before these guys get back and kick our ass.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“Should we see what’s in those treasure boxes?”

My lips compressed to a thin line. I thought about the Horizon name all over that gear. I didn’t want to touch anything that had the Horizon name on it.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “They didn’t have anything we want to touch.”

“Whatever,” Kris said, rolling her eyes and stepping into the forest. I followed, giving the clearing one last glance and half expecting those two pricks to show up to gank us.

“Did you really just call that girl a hottie?” I asked.

Kris shrugged. “I figure it’s a good chance she’s a hottie. At least in the game. Everyone in games like this is hot. Ideal self-image projection and all that crap. Besides, did you see any ugly options in character creation?”

I shook my head, though she wasn’t wrong. The character creation screen didn’t have the option to go ugly. “You’re ridiculous sometimes, you know it? That hottie could be a dude for all we know.”

“Yeah, but when you think about it does it really matter when we’re in a game world where everything happening seems way more realistic than anything you’re ever going to see in the real world?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“What I’m talking about is if you’re in virtual reality it doesn’t matter if the chick you’re getting with is a dude who lives on the other side of the world if the game world says she’s a chick and she feels like a chick and she…”

I held up a hand and blessedly Kris shut the fuck up. It was usually even money as to whether or not she actually shut the fuck up when I encouraged her to shut the fuck up.

“Gonna stop you right there,” I said.

Kris wiggled her eyebrows. “Oh yeah? Because when you think about it…”

“Please shut up,” I begged.

“Look,” Kris said. “You can’t tell me you’re not just a little curious about what’d happen when someone has one set of parts in the real world and a different functional set in the game world? How does the game know what nerve endings to tickle to get things going?”

“Would you shut up about that already?” I asked.

“But if the game allows people to play characters of the opposite gender, and I know they do because I saw it in character select, then it stands to reason they had to research how that all works. We know in-game brothels are a thing because that girl mentioned them, and…”

“Please,” I said through gritted teeth as I pushed branches out of the way. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. There aren’t words to describe how utterly not interested I am in this conversation.”

It’s not that I particularly cared what gender someone chose when they logged into a game. The old acronym that “girl” in an MMO actually stood for Guy In Real Life was something I’d been familiarized with early on in my gaming career, though I'd always thought the kinds of people who tossed around terms like tended to be assholes.

“Y’know that means the hottie hiding in the trees could very well be some overweight dude with more body hair than gorillas back before they went extinct in the wild,” I said.

Kris turned and grinned at me.

“This doesn’t mean I’m interested in this conversation,” I said.

“But you’re thinking about it,” Kris said.

I sighed. She was right. I was thinking about it.

“Besides, does it matter what she is IRL if she looks like a sweet hottie in the game world?” Kris asked. “It’s like that dude said in the old Matrix movie. Y’know the one before that terrible remake? Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and I wouldn’t mind finding a little bliss in the game.”

“You’re impossible,” I said. “Honestly. The whole thirsty gamer thing doesn’t suit you.”

“Says you,” Kris sniffed.

I looked at the forest around us to avoid Kris going on about gender roles in massive online games. It was my tried and true method for tuning Kris out. She knew to tap me to get my attention if there was something important going down. Otherwise she was happy as long as she had someone to talk at.

I spotted more of those small yellow flowers I'd seen back in the clearing but hadn’t had time to inspect properly.

I had the time now. So I leaned down for a closer look. I reached out and brushed my fingers against a petal. A notification popped up telling me five flower petals had been added to my inventory, accompanied by an animation of the flower petals flying into my bag.

Huh. That was neat. It looked like the developers had decided to strike a balance between realism and convenience, which meant I didn’t have to actually pick the flowers and put them in that bag.

I was starting to get excited. If the things were flying into my inventory then those petals had to be some sort of reagent. Items in games had purpose, otherwise developers and art departments wouldn’t waste time on them.

The presence of reagents meant Lotus Online had crafting. I hadn’t found any crafting items while I was going through loot databases, but that was probably because I’d been looking through armor and weapons. I felt like an idiot now for not broadening my horizons.

Crafting was always a fun legit way to break a game by messing with the mechanics, but something told me it was going to be a lot more difficult to mess with the crafting mechanics in this game than in the single player or multiplayer Horizon modules I'd played and broken with Kris.

I grinned. That only meant the rewards were going to be that much more amazing when I figured out how to break the crafting system. Assuming, of course, that the same attention to detail had been paid to making an intricate crafting system as to the rest of the game design.

The more intricate something was, the more rewarding it was when you figured out how to have your way with it. Complex systems yielded complex rewards and all that. I’d take advantage of a simple exploit if I found it, but something like this could very well be the magnum opus of my game breaking career.

And if Horizon really was hanging around in this game then I had a pretty fucking good idea of who I’d be bending over and giving a good fucking if I figured out how to break this game.

“Holy shit,” I said as a window popped up.

“Oh come on,” Kris said. “Are you seriously going to be that old fashioned about this sort of thing when you’ve been gaming your whole life? Remember Treasa who used to heal for us a few years back? I heard her on voice chat, and that deep voice didn’t belong to anyone who…”

“Shut up,” I said. “I think I found something important here.”

“Important?” Kris asked, stopping and turning to look at me. “What’s up?”

“Hold on,” I said as my eyes darted across the notification window that’d popped up.

It let me know I'd unlocked the top level Gathering skill as well as the subskill of Herbs. Interesting. I also saw related subskills from other skill trees I hadn’t unlocked yet that were part of the overarching Gathering skill. It was like the game was encouraging me to unlock those new skill trees by giving me tantalizing glimpses of what else was possible.

“Wait, are you picking flowers?” Kris asked. “What the fuck could possibly be important about picking fucking flowers?”

“Maybe I am,” I said. “What’s it to you?”

Kris rolled her eyes and let out a long suffering sigh. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d been brought along for the ride as I gathered reagents for crafting. It probably wouldn’t be the last time either if the suspicions about what I could do with the crafting system in this game were anywhere close to correct.

“I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with that crafting crap,” Kris said.

I grinned as I looked down at the yellow flower petals in my inventory. I couldn’t quite describe what it was about gathering and crafting digital stuff that drew me in. I'd always loved crafting shit. There were times, before Diana’s accident, when I'd had more fun gathering and crafting things and playing the market on a game’s auction house than I did actually going out and playing the damn game.

The only problem with that was there were so many games where the developers seemed to think that crafting should be an afterthought, or only in service of lame things like raiding rather than being a pursuit innately worthy of investing time in because it was fun in and of itself. I'd always pined for a game where leveling crafting was just as rewarding as learning the intricacies of taking down raid bosses, with equivalent loot rewards, but I had yet to find a game with developers who felt the same way despite so much searching.

I was hopeful now though. So far everything else about Lotus Online had been way more thought out and immersive than any other game. I could only hope the same would hold true for the crafting system.

Still, I had to phrase this in a way that Kris would appreciate if I wanted her onboard. Or at the very least if I wanted her to be patient and stand by while I gathered shit.

“You know how I feel about crafting,” I said. “It’s a good way to break a game, and breaking a game is what makes a game fun for me.”

“You and your game breaking,” Kris said. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe you’d have more fun if you just played the damn game?”

She whipped out her two-handed hammer and whirled it around her head a couple of times. Of course she wasn’t nearly as skilled with that thing in this game so she nearly took her head off with some self-inflicted blunt force trauma. Though, come to think of it, she had a habit of nearly taking her head off with whatever weapon she was flourishing in just about every game we’d played using the Lotus hardware.

“Maybe it’d be more fun to play the game like the normies, but I seriously doubt it,” I said.

“Those normies are playing the game the right way,” Kris said.

“Hey, I’m not going to feel bad just because everyone else can’t figure out the intricacies of game systems that don’t involve bashing shit over the head. If it’s in the game then it’s worth exploring and exploiting, and stuff like this is a hell of a lot easier to exploit than smashing low level digital bunny rabbits with your hammer,” I said.

“Behold the mighty warrior, slayer of flowers!” Kris said in a tone that I took to be just a tad mocking. She held her hammer over her head, looking for all the world like a sand person celebrating their most recent victory over a young Mark Hamill.

“Don’t knock it,” I said, touching another flower and adding a few more petals to my inventory. There were little intricate veins in the thing that almost seemed to glow as I inspected it. “Crafting can be a path to fame and fortune in games like this.”

“Fame and fortune?” Kris asked with a snort. “When did you ever get fame and fortune from crafting?”

“Well, fortune at least,” I said. “There was one time when I took a level one character in NuWoW and used a few coppers I got from killing mobs in the starter area to completely corner the market on a couple of different ores without ever leaving the capital city. That was fun.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” Kris said. “I spent the whole night trying to get you to run NeoDeadmines with me, and you were so busy with your auction house shenanigans that you wouldn’t come out to play.”

“Whatever,” I said, tapping another flower and adding it to my inventory. When I inspected it in my inventory a tooltip came up.

Nhewb’s Blessing is a flower that grows in moderately untamed forests around settlements that border the wilderness. It can be used as a reagent in several potions.

That wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start. If I was a betting man I would’ve put money down on the moderately tame wildernesses Nhewb’s Blessing grew in being mostly the kind of areas where low level players got their start.

“So I got Gathering: Herbs just by touching one of these flowers,” I muttered. “And it’s showing me skills I haven’t gotten already. Looks like the game doesn’t give you a skill until you do it.”

“Duh,” Kris said. “How else would it work? You have to do something before you get the skill to start leveling it. That isn’t exactly revolutionary game design.”

“No, that’s important,” I said. “If we’re going to have fun and break this game we’re going to have to figure out how the devs thought about putting it together.”

Kris leaned in and tapped me on the forehead. “If you’re going to have fun in this game then you’re going to have to figure out what the devs were thinking when they put it together so you can try and break it. I’m perfectly happy smashing things with my warhammer. You’re only happy when you’re smashing the nice systems the game devs put in place so us normies can have a good time putting our brains on autopilot and doing fetch quests.”

“Whatever,” I said, tapping more flowers that went into my inventory. Meanwhile my Gathering:Herbs skill was moving up with each tap. It was addicting. “I wonder what kind of perks I might get for leveling Gathering?”

Kris shrugged. “You’re the one who unlocked the skill. Look at the skill tree and see if it shows you.”

“Huh,” I said. “Good idea!”

“You don’t have to sound surprised that I had a good idea,” Kris said with a sniff.

“Maybe not, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m surprised,” I said, winking at her and earning a single finger salute for my trouble.

I thought of the skill tree and sure enough, just like every other status window in this game, thinking of it was enough to make it appear.

It was time to see what there was to see with this fun new skill I’d unlocked, and from there figure out how I could use that to pull off my ultimate exploit in the most complex video game ever created!