Miles watched his friends explode at one another and Sean stomp off. Although to be fair it was pretty one-sided with Kevin unleashing all the anger and frustration he’d been feeling since things had gone badly for them earlier that day. Everyone remaining in the room stared at each other in shock for a few seconds before anyone spoke.

“I suggest we calm down a bit and have some lunch,” Tim said. “We’ve had a hard day so far and I, for one, am hungry and crabby.” Ever the sage, Tim was trying to defuse the situation.

“You do that. I’m going to kill some mutants and actually get something done,” Kevin replied hostilely. He hadn’t calmed down one bit and it was pretty clear he was going to be difficult to be around until he got his temper under control. Miles had noticed that Emmy wasn’t looking at Kevin and it was pretty clear that it wasn’t only Sean who had been affected by their friend’s outburst.

Miles took the lead and started moving towards the break room. Everyone but Kevin followed and after they were served their meal via dispenser, they sat quietly to eat. Someone offered to go get Sean and see if he wanted to eat with them but Tim suggested that they give him a bit more time to cool off.

Suddenly Linca spoke up, “What are we supposed to do now? It’s bad enough that we’re all level 1 and we have no idea what is really going on out there except the world has gone to shit. Now we’re down two members including our guild leader. Damnit!”

He couldn’t dispute the fact that the Misfits were having a bad day. They hadn’t been this entrenched in drama since they’d had a former guildy and top raider try to take over the guild from the inside by spreading nasty rumors.

Tim responded calmly, “I think it’s pretty clear that we need to give Kevin and Sean some space. That said, we still have plenty of useful things we can be doing. First, we need to level our characters again. Secondly, we need to gather some additional information about what has changed in the last 24 hours. Finally, we need to find a boat and make our way to San Francisco.” The way that he so calmly explained these things made it seem extremely easy, although Miles wasn’t fooled. This was going to be one of their most difficult missions. However, Tim was right about one thing. Getting riled up and in each other’s faces about how things weren’t going their way wasn’t going to fix their problems.

Miles finished his soup and put down his spoon. “Let’s get started.”

***AR Online – Aeon 1.882.90***

The Misfits gained several levels in the first few minutes after logging back on. They’d just fought a small army of mutants they’d encountered not a hundred yards from their spawn point. One of the advantages of fighting as an entire raid party was that killing ten or fifteen level 1 creatures at a time wasn’t that difficult. However, the disadvantage was that they lost out of the XP gains because they were in a party.

While the valley their bunker was in had been eerily quiet the day before, the place was swarming with enemies now. In stealth mode, Cheezus snuck up on another party of five mutants that he’d spotted just a minute ago. He stabbed the first one in the neck:

Instakill

Stealth broken

One of the mutants turned and clawed him the face, showing no surprise that it had been attacked seemingly out of nowhere.

-65 hp slashing

-25 hp slashing

Cheezus fell back a few steps and prepared to parry the claws with his knife. He couldn’t take too many more hits like that at such a low level. Fortunately, he wasn’t fighting alone. Zeffu blasted one of the creatures with a wave of magical water:

-150 hp water magic

And Deathberry finished the creature with a deathbolt. A healing light surrounded Cheezus for a second and he regained most of his health while he surged forward and sprayed the remaining three with a dozen knives using his whirlwind attack.

+150 hp healing light

-105 hp stabbing

-113 hp stabbing

-101 hp stabbing

Deathberry dotted them up with an unholy aura and Cheezus, Thag and Zeffu whittled down the remaining three with their subsequent attacks.

***Congratulations. You are now level 2***

Excellent, Cheezus thought. Now I just need to figure out how I want to allocate my points.

Cheezus – Level 2 Rogue

HP: 205

STA: 102

Att: 24

Def: 16

Mag Att: 13

Mag Def: 11

Str: 12

Speed: 20

Vit: 14

Spirit: 10

After reviewing his stats, it was pretty clear that he needed to focus on more throughput and for rogues that meant speed. All of his attacks were agility based and therefore as he sped up not only would his accuracy increase he would do more damage as well. He’d received a total of 3 points to allocate and he put all six into speed. At later levels he knew he would need to become more strategic. When he was previously maximum level in Champions he’d put about 2/3 of his points into speed and then the remaining points into vitality. Staying alive was probably the most important part of doing good DPS.

Deathberry spoke up after the last battle. “We’re going to need to go about this a bit more intelligently. We only have one life in this game whereas in Champions dying was merely an annoyance. To do that we’re going to need to be higher level than a lot of the monsters we’re going to fight,” he said. “I’ve got an idea I’d like to try.” Cheezus knew that when Deathberry had an “idea” it usually meant something crazy but also probably something wicked effective.

“I’m game. What do we need to do?” Cheezus asked. Deathberry explained that they would all drop group and everyone would tag a monster before they killed the enemy mutants. This way they would not have to split the experience points of the kills with group members but still got the benefit of working together. If that worked, it proved the game balance was definitely broken but that wouldn’t be the first time Deathberry and the rest of the Misfits had hacked something unintended.

Over the next hill, Cheezus spotted the next group of mutants. There were fifteen of them which was going to be a challenge. If this worked, it would be pretty miraculous. Cheez snuck up on them and instead of using his backstab ability he used his whirlwind and hit ten of the fifteen attackers. Next was the important part – he ran like hell back to the group. By the time he’d reached them everyone had tagged the fifteen mobs with a ranged attack and then Thag aggroed as many as she could so the group could start DPSing them down. After Linca landed a couple of healing lights on him Cheezus kept running occasionally throwing out his whirlwind ability as it came off cool down. He wasn’t doing a ton of damage to the ten remaining mutants he had on him but the rest of the group was able to quickly dispatch the other five.

He ran back in a circle towards the group, his health dangerously low. Just as he was about to go down, Linca was able to drop several large healing light spells on him and they repeated the process twice more until they were able to finish off the remaining mutants.

***You are now level 12***

That was definitely a lot more rewarding than their previous fights because they weren’t being penalized for operating as a group. The only issue now was that they likely wouldn’t get any experience for killing level 1 mutants. It was time to move on to a different zone and hopefully find some more difficult monsters to kill.

They went back to the mine they’d visited earlier in the day and found Sam milling around the mine. He had obviously been crying and was digging a grave for his two friends who had been killed by the mutants. It was still difficult for him to reconcile the fact that only a day ago the mutants they had all killed were people who had lived in this valley, many of them were miners and some of them could have even been Sam's friends and family. How many mutants had they killed to level up? It was a sobering reminder of the reality they were now ensconced in and made Cheezus wished that Smashit were here to advise him. While Deathberry was a brilliant strategist, it was Smashit who was the heart of the group and helped them see through these types of difficulties. Looking over at both Zeffu and Linca it was clear they were also blinking back tears while Emmy had her tough girl look on that showed she was determined not to lose face by crying.

The Misfits helped Sam pay his respects and then as agreed they all went in the direction of Silverton. Oddly enough they didn’t encounter any more mutants after that. Cheezus wasn’t sure if it was because of the fact that they’d cleared out the valley so well earlier or something else. When they arrived in town it was pretty clear that something had come through here like a storm. The Misfits entered town not knowing what to expect but the only thing remaining were the piles of the dead mutants. Sam cried again when they reached his house. The nearly flattened structure was hardly recognizable as a home and inside were two mutant children and a woman – clearly Sam’s family.

***Sam’s Request: Failed***

They hadn’t been able to warn the people of Silverton in time. This time Cheezus had to excuse himself while Sam buried his family and wept. The rest of the Misfits were silent except for the occasional sobs that could be heard from most of the group. Deathberry approached him and said in a quiet voice so not to disturb the miner, “It looks like whatever came through here had a lot of power. I saw signs of explosives used in the town and many of the wounds on the mutants look like those that Krok would do.” Cheezus looked at him in stunned shock. How the hell could Kevin do this to these people? This was a massacre. Immediately Cheezus felt a wave of remorse as well. Were the rest of us any better this afternoon leveling up on the dead bodies of the miners and their families that likely had lived in this area only a day beforehand? Looking at Deathberry, he realized that he too recognized the human cost of their excursion today. Never before had something in game affected Cheezus this way and it was likely to haunt the group for some time to come.

“As bad as this is and despite what we’ve done we need to keep going and figure out what caused all these people to change,” Deathberry said.

No matter what, huh? Isn’t that what murderers throughout history used to justify their mass killings?