Accustomed to historical accounts of various classical-era cultures, fantasy novels, lesser online games, and the personality quirks of third-world dictators, Tesla assumed that gaining access to any district nominally under the control of Diatom's nobility would be a plodding and cumbersome task. This was not the case; instead, though the zone itself was walled off from the rest of the city, the ryujin Spark found himself waved through by a disinterested guard who couldn't even bring himself to get up from a ramshackle card table his compatriots had slapped together. Security is lax inside the primary wall, Tesla thought; there's too much faith in something that's only meant to restrain armies and giant monsters. An internal uprising would throw the city into chaos.

At least the soldiers walking a beat were paying attention. Tesla would often catch one out of the corner of his eye trying to surreptitiously tail him while deciding whether or not he constituted a genuine criminal threat. Unfortunately, the foot patrols all appeared to be composed of younger soldiers with low levels and more enthusiasm than skill. Since he carried no obvious weapons, and miraculously failed to mug the occasional well-coifed servant posted at the gates of his or her master's home, the would-be heroes would quickly lose interest and wander off in pursuit of more obvious prey. Tesla judged them to be energetic and motivated, but noted they suffered from an attention deficit. That may work in their favor, he considered, as their patrol routes become increasingly randomized commensurate to the level of boredom they're experiencing. Even experienced criminals would have a hard time predicting where they'll pop up next. Of course, that means little if the guardsman is so weak he's practically useless. Ideally, there needs to be a veteran paired with the rookie for backup. That thought conjured an image of a certain overexuberant dwarf, and Tesla snorted in spite of himself.

For a "Nobles' Quarter" the district was rather drab in appearance. This was only to be expected, since all the properties were forbiddingly walled as a warning to would-be thieves and malcontents. Tesla was sure the grounds beyond were either as beautiful or opulently gaudy as money could buy, but the only way to know for sure would be to engage in activities certain to attract the attention of thrill-seeking young guardsmen or, a far more frightening prospect, any coldly professional personal bodyguards in the nobles' employ. The ryujin clasped his hands behind his back and sighed; it's better not to raise a fuss.

Tesla's pace slowed the deeper into the district he walked. This was partly due to his desire not to be harassed by any other soldiers suffering from more boredom than common sense, and partly because his glorified GPS was on the fritz. Book was tossing up identifier screens in meaningless locations. None of them were legible, all of them were nonsensical. To make matters worse, Book itself appeared to be fraying at the edges and would randomly jet out small bursts of fractal light that reminded Tesla of the golems' compression functions back at Bandicoot's Resale and Repair.

Needless to say, the minimap was a lost cause. "If Esperia hadn't insisted I borrow one of her city charts, god only knows where I'd be by now." Tesla sidestepped a rook-drawn carriage and unscrolled the city plan with a rueful chuckle. "Of course, this is a little too much detail. Only an architect needs to know where the cobblestones in the streets come from, or their proper spacing."

The surroundings became even more outlandish the closer Tesla got to his target. It began with Book tossing out random trivia without prompting, what little of it could be read at any rate. Then an occasional fractal would pop up from the environment itself. Once, a carriage's wheels started spinning in opposing directions while the vehicle itself was standing still. As Book became totally incomprehensible the fractals were suddenly everywhere. People, no, the NPC's began randomly disappearing and reappearing; sometimes they were replaced in mid-stride by a completely different character.

There was no panic; there was no fear. In fact, the deeper into the Nobles' Quarter the ryujin walked the more stiff and expressionless everyone around him became. No one except Tesla noticed these things, which meant they were something on a deeper level than a magical event or a haunted piece of real estate. The player's immersion broke as he was forced to admit the truth. "This is a glitch."

With Book out of commission Tesla couldn't contact an administrator, so he was left with two options: First he could withdraw from the compromised district until Book became functional again, then puzzle his way through how to message an admin and file a bug notification. Second, he could delve deeper into the mess and try to fix it himself.

"Damn. Of all the things to happen, why did it have to be this?" Tesla crossed his muscular arms and scowled at the squared-off bits and pieces of light floating past him. Even his voice was muted; the air felt dry and yet cloying at the same time. He realized there was no sense of hot or cold. A bird flew overhead, upside-down and missing its wings. "Screw it; I'm fixing this myself. Doing it that way might put me back in the groove, so to speak."

There was no need to follow any map, the fractals flowed down the streets like a lazy river from the same source. Tesla silently bet his ass it was the Waving Heathers. Walking against that flow was like wading through knee deep water.

The Spark dialed up his processing speed. This time it improved his movement, removing any doubt that the current state of affairs was anything other than a programming error. At the same time the bits of light resolved themselves into slivers of jumbled code. "Conflicting elements," Tesla muttered, "mutually exclusive goals breaking a paper-thin quest chain, expired time limits, incorrectly established event flags... who scripted this crap?"

The surroundings gave way altogether to a gordion knot of intransigent data. Even Tesla's avatar felt as thought it would lose cohesion and collapse from the weight of all that angry information. He needed to move forward, but couldn't; his own character data ran the risk of being swallowed in the silent maelstrom if he dove any deeper.

"In for a penny, in for a pound, as old General McIntyre used to say. -Usually right before he would order me to warm up for another threat of orbital bombardment." Tesla sat on what he assumed was referenced as the ground. "If the body can't go, then we leave the body behind." The Dream Eater's "Sleepwalker" skill was classified in Book's encyclopedic section as an out of body experience by which Tesla could invade the sleeping mind of a target. He had no idea if it would let him separate his thoughts enough to go tripping behind the curtains of a virtual world, but it was the only tool he had at his disposal...

For hours, Tesla's mind wandered the convoluted pathways of a crudely-patched program and marveled at the monumental hubris of whichever unnamed developer slapped such a pig together in the first place. It was hodgepodge, random; the unquestioned work of a near-total amateur or a professional trying to hack something together without anywhere near enough time to do a proper job. At the same time it was a brilliant piece of misdirection through obfuscatory flim-flam that would have netted someone a tremendous payout in unprecedented levels of in-game swag with none of the higher-ups in the company even noticing until it was too late.

The Waving Heathers estate was just the tip of an immense ship-sinking iceberg. Data cannot lie; even when knotted into damn-near unreadable garbage Tesla could see the scope of that unknown programmer's ambition. Sure, the Heathers was magnificent in its own right. Esperia's descriptions of the grounds were limited, but the property itself was everything she said and more. No, the true value of the land was in its status as an immense quest hub.

The total number of event flags had to measure in the thousands, and all of them were tied to the whim of the property's owner. Half of the quests had game-breaking rewards made up of OOPArts that were clearly Easter eggs ripped from much older games then polished for Diamondback's unique visuals and scripts. All the events were straightforward, though some were extensive, and worth unbalanced levels of experience and money upon completion.

Tesla contemplated backing out. The Heathers is a road to God Mode just waiting to happen to somebody. If this idiot writer hadn't have choked at the clutch, when he or she established the starting sequences for the quest to obtain the Heathers in the first place, the whole of Diamondback would have collapsed under the weight of their overpowered stupidity. Maybe I should call for a GM to come in and nuke the whole thing.

Of course, even as he thought it out Tesla continued to draw closer to the core of the knot. It pulsed with a life of its own; two disconnected threads of information that snapped and smashed against one another like battling cobras. He began to realize why the scheme fell apart. Put simply, the scripting style for the two primaries were radically different. If he were to describe it, then Tesla would say that one thread was finely-spun with great economy while the other was chunky and fouled with excessive garbage data. That clean thread had to have come either from proper members of the development team or the Soai; it was a part of Corundum itself.

The sad part is that, as bad as the programming is, the whole thing would have worked flawlessly if its programmer could have overcome this one last hurdle. Tesla gave a mental groan as he was struck with a realization. What if the GM's the idiot programmer? What if he or she is just waiting for a complaint to be filed to legally swoop in and "fix" the problem, then claim the hub as some form of compensation or by claiming some right to oversight?

That wasn't the only problem. The fact that Tesla himself was involved meant that other Sparks could do something similar. The thought of a party of kids finding something as outrageous as the Heathers, then somehow modding a workaround from the inside just like Tesla was doing, incited a crawling sensation in the back of is mind.

If the GM is clean and he nukes the Heathers I'm doomed. Sparks would come from all around to play in the fallout from such an event; the Soai would inevitably get involved. Diatom would go crazy. If the GM is dirty and he mods a patch for this abomination I'm doomed. He'll unbalance the game, cutting its life-expectancy down to nothing as players rage-quit Diamondback in frustration. The same thing would happen if some Edgy McEdgelord and his guild of wan'na-be warriors were to get their hands on it. I can't simply leave it alone, either. The fact that I'm here now might mean that the Soai are becoming aware of it. What if they decide to let the whole thing run its course; patch the disconnected flag then toss some random nobody ass-backwards into it? It's the same damn end result!

The only acceptable pathway was to place the Heathers in the hands of someone who wouldn't abuse it, someone who had a better reason not to make use of such ridiculously-broken power ups. Unfortunately, Tesla didn't know anyone who fit that description. Not even he was entirely trustworthy; Tesla coudn't count the total number of times he applied cheat codes and mods to old console games just for the hell of it.

It's not like I have a choice either way, does it? Nobody else is here, and I don't have a handy thousand-point psychological survey to hand out to AI's and players just to find out who can be trusted and who can't. Tesla mentally reached out towards the hacked together mess and inwardly frowned at the spongy response it gave back. Damn, the whole setup is squishy. A player needs to be at least level forty to attempt this... what's it called? "Deathly March of the Black Hand Assassin's Guild?" Never mind, the problem is that the assassins are all overpowered. Your level would actually need to be up in the triple digits to successfully clean out the Heathers with anything less than a squad of cataphracts, but the base programming shows that the Soai have successfully maintained Diatom as a two-digit level zone since Diamondback started. That dichotomy is just another reason why this patch failed.

Successfully splicing the code together would get the quest started and drag the Waving Heathers out of "glitch limbo," but it would also set free a small army of comparitively-superpowered killers into the center of Diatom. Since that absolutely was not acceptable, Tesla traced his way through the spaghetti layers of code to identify and flag every aspect of the original quest. It was a painstaking process.

All clues located: Check. All timed events marked complete: Check. All assassins flagged as dead: Check. Rescue the princess... wait, seriously? This asshole added a princess? Tesla double-checked the soup of information, then dragged up the relevant file. Shit; a kidnapped royal. There's another couple of timers, too; one making sure that the princess gets junctioned in as a current member of the royal family and another that's... a damn killswitch. "Rescue her within 15 minutes of hearing her call for help or you find her raped and murdered by a lieutenant of the Black Hand." No failure penalty, victory nets a follower with royal clout. He extracted the sprite data, then tried not to break into a seizure. She's the current king's sister! This calls her "The Lioness of the Rodannes Plains!" She's going to call for help, a freaking lion-breed zoan amazon? Her would-be rapist looks like he could barely lift a stick! Are the level disparities really that over-the-top? ...Yup. If I ever find this bastard, GM or not, I'm killing him. Whatever; princess: Check. Boss flagged as dead: Check. ...This looks like a good stopping point. From here onward there's nothing to break Diatom's power balance except, well, me if I ever abuse this damn hub. Tesla turned back to the start of the code and began to carefully splice it into Diatom's scripts. Cross your fingers if you got 'em. Say a prayer if you don't.

The world of Corundum rushed back into Tesla's mind like a static-filled cream pie to the face, then resolved itself into the artistic anime world he was rapidly becoming familiar with. The disorientation that came along with it forced him to groan and clasp at his head. Luckily, he was still seated; vertigo would have dropped him to the floor otherwise.

"Ugh." Tesla dragged himself to his feet with a long-suffering grunt and cocked his head at his surroundings. "What, the deed's more important but the princess is closer, or something like that? Where are we, anyway?"

"No, thanks, just give me the shortest route to her Highness." The boss fight must have been held in the treasury, I guess. Tesla glanced around him, his eyes adjusting to the feeble light given off by a single orb hovering overhead. The surroundings were nothing special; they were typical of the dressed stone architecture found in any subterranean complex, much like the Temple prison, though significantly reinforced against thievery. Hmph, looks more like where the Skywalkers were keeping their seasonal decorations. Miss Highwind did say they were out of money by the time they lost the property; maybe they crammed the place with bric-a-brac so it wouldn't look so empty. Some of the objects his eyes skated across produced little wiggling sensations in the back of his mind, though, indicating that they were tied to the quest hub in some fashion or another. Tesla studiously ignored them. "Book, itemize the branching quests attached to the Waving Heathers hub and compose a file for me. I need to know what's safe and what's not here."

"That much? ...Bastard programmer was more gung-ho than I thought." Tesla fumbled his way to what looked like a heavy iron door and squeezed through a narrow gap between it and the frame. "Right, the map's got her. Looks like her royal highness is in the manor dungeon. ...Leaving aside why the Skywalker family would have an on-site dungeon, it looks like she's not that far away."

Judging by Book's minimap function there wasn't a great deal to the Heathers' basement levels. The lowest floor housed the treasury, the well, the wine cellar, cold storage for meats, and a couple of root cellars. The uppermost basement was the old servants' quarters, which the Black Hand had conveniently retooled for their own living space. Sandwiched between them was a barracks for the Skywalkers' hired muscle and the dungeon. In theory the layout was pretty straightforward, but in reality the second basement wasn't directly connected to the first and third. Unlike the servants, or the food and money for that matter, the previous owners of the Waving Heathers wanted their guards and their prisoners kept "at a remove" from their noble sight. Tesla was forced to ascend to the first floor of the manor and access the barracks from an outbuilding similar to the prison entrance he left behind over a month ago.

There was no time to admire the main house as Tesla dashed through; he only caught a blurry glimpse of aristocratic finery before he was outside via a small service entrance. Thankfully, nothing was locked. It was an easy matter to traverse to the barracks' gate and push his way inside.

At the bottom of the descending stairs the ryujin was forced to whistle in spite of himself. "That's a lot of grease stains." The dungeon was better-lit than the treasury, making it easy to count out the gently-collapsing piles of ash that peppered the floor. "How many assassins were there, again?"

Nearly a thousand men, crammed into three floors like sardines. Tesla imagined whoever set the Heathers up designing it that way in order to both make them easier to kill and earn ridiculous amounts of experience in one fell swoop, probably with a glorified grenade or some AoE skill. At the same time, he realized that the numbers would have made it impossible to rescue the "Lioness of Rodannes" within even a fifteen minute time limit. Tesla tried to imagine wading through a sea of impossibly-levelled enemies while hearing a woman in the background begging for her life, then decided it was easier imagining his clawed hands around the scrawny neck of whichever idiot scripted the event.

Beyond the utilitarian barracks lay the dungeon proper with its rows of cells, classic "hanging birdcage" body restraints, and a plethora of torture implements big and small. The interconnected halls stank of old blood and stale sweat; they were probably the most well-lit beneath the manor house, as if their owners didn't want to miss a single drop of blood, vomit, and tears that undoubtedly stained every square inch of the facility. Tesla's skin crawled at the thought.

At the center of what Tesla could only describe as the primary operating theatre was a complex contraption that appeared to be a fusion of a mortician's table, a gynecologist's bench, and a rack. Strapped firmly into the... thing was a zoan, a lion-breed woman with a gaze as hard and brittle as diamonds. An intense aura of imperious military command swathed Princess Trinzet Diatom like a suit of armor; the fact that she was as naked as the day she was born didn't affect her in the slightest. Her voice was low, like the distant thunder of an enormous cavalry charge, overflowing with rage and anxiety. "Get. Me. Out."