Chapter TwoRent

Rat leaned back into the tree and listened. Their speech was mostly hissing and broken English, some developer's attempt at a lizard tongue. She peered around the trunk and examined the nameplate of the largest one.

Rat was good. One of the best, even, and snowbolds were pretty easy prey. If she'd been with a group she could have stood back and plinked them with arrows as some warrior-type absorbed the damage. But she was alone and equipped for speed and stealth. If she wasn't careful, a well-placed arrow to her heart or a mace to her head would mean a shameful log out and a long walk back home.

Not that she'd died in weeks, and not that she was going to die now, as long as she kept moving. Rat was very good at kiting, keeping her enemies just out of reach and picking them off one at a time. If there had been no cleric she could have set her traps, yelled at the snowbolds and let them chase her into them. The cleric made things a bit trickier– he could heal the others, maybe even res them. Snowbolds were smart enough to surround their casters to protect them, and Rat was too far off to get off a clean shot before they'd be on top of her.

She pulled an inventory stone out of her right pocket. Small items appeared before her, organized by their purpose. She grabbed one with her hand.

She nocked her bow and shot four arrows past the snowbolds on the right. She took a breath and counted. One, two, three, and suddenly there was a flurry of commotion. She peered around the tree to see arrows flying and kobolds scattering. The illusions were firing a volley at one of the snowbold warriors, who charged them. The cleric stood back, muttering incantations.

Rat grabbed another item from her floating inventory, a Minor Potion of Invisibility, and drank it in a gulp. It was a cheap potion and it would only work for a few seconds– just long enough. Rat unsheathed the dagger on her leg, ran up behind the cleric and planted the dagger in his back, aiming for the place between the ribs where the heart would be if kobolds had hearts. He died instantly. The other kobolds, who had just then vanquished their illusionary foes, turned and charged at her.

"Desipula displodo," whispered Rat, as she flicked her wrist toward the ground before her. An inscription burned itself into the snow. She aimed her bow at the nearest nameplate.

A quick shot to the eye and the snowbold went down screaming, pulling at the arrow. The others were almost on top of her. She turned and ran as her trap sprung with a thunderous boom, knocking three of her pursuers to the ground. An arrow hit her in the side and her suit vibrated violently. It didn't hit any vitals, but it was going to freeze up her suit and slow her down.

Rat nocked another arrow and returned fire, hitting the snowbold archer in the throat– a little low, but good enough to kill an archer. The others were getting to their feet. Rat was wiry and tall and she employed her long legs to gain some distance. She cut to the right, nocking an illusion arrow and planting it into a tree as she passed. Then to the right again. Then she turned back to where she'd been a few seconds before. The snowbolds had destroyed the illusion and were looking around, not sure where she'd gone.

Now they were playing her game. She pulled the arrow out of her side and placed her hands on the wound.

"Sana-me." The wound closed and her suit unfroze.

Altered World had unparalleled gameplay, and for that players were willing to overlook the utter lack of originality in the game itself. Spells were cast by speaking Latin of an accuracy which suggested the liberal use of Google Translate. An effort inside Solenoid to create new languages had been met with resistance by a community that cared more about their years of memorizing spells than with in-game continuity. The content was a hodgepodge to say the least, but nobody seemed to mind.

"Desipula viridi." Arcane etchings sizzled on the ground in front of her.

"Over here, fuckers!" she yelled. She didn't care much for role playing. RP points didn't pay the bills.

The three remaining snowbolds turned and charged at her, yelling a battlecry in unison.

Rat nocked an arrow and shot it into the mouth of the screaming snowbold warrior in front, who fell backwards. Then she stepped back and nocked another. She shot at the rogue but he dodged it. He didn't dodge the trap, though. A sizzling, snapping sound and vines shot out of the ground and caught his legs. Rat nocked another arrow and let it fly into the chest of the warrior, who was just about upon her. She dropped her bow and pulled the dagger. The snowbold swung down at her with a heavy mace, but she dove out of the way. He turned to swing again and she lunged into him. Her suit froze up and her back vibrated intensely. Her vision turned a pale red– the dreaded Death's Door effect. Just as she could kill a mob with one well-placed shot, so they could kill her. Gone were the days of standing in front of a boss for hours, autocasting spells and managing mana consumption. In Altered World, combat was the real deal.

Rat pushed the snowbold off her. Green blood seeped out of its chest, right out of the wound in his heart that her dagger had made.

Rat staggered over to the snowbold rogue, who was ensnared but unharmed.

"Please, please, don't kill me."

"Why not?"

"I, I has information."

"What kind of information?"

"I, I has a map. Treasure, you like treasure?" The treasure usually wasn't much, but if she played to her alignment she'd earn some RP points for sparing him.

"Sorry, I gotta pay the rent." Rat opened her inventory again and grabbed an Essence Siphon. She aimed it at the squirming snowbold and pressed the trigger. Blue energy seeped through the creature's skin and into the siphon. The vine trap disappeared as the lifeless body slumped to the ground. A stack of glowing green vials appeared in her inventory. Living victims were a good payday.

Mobs, as virtual monsters were often referred to by the community, would spawn at random GPS coordinates whenever no players were nearby. Geography determined what kind of mobs would spawn: dragons could usually be found at the top of mountains, gnolls at the edge of a warm wooded area, goblins near cavernous areas and so on. Arctic Kobolds spawned only in the Northernmost latitudes, and Rat lived in the trees north of Vancouver, an hour and a half up the highway toward Squamish. Nothing but snowbolds and ice trolls for miles.

Essences were used in most of the enchantments in the game and they fetched up to ten bucks a vial at the market, real cash. The money she made on essence vials wasn't much, but it was a consistent racket– wealthy players had an insatiable need for ice magic and it was better than working fast food to pay rent.

Rat checked her stash– eight essence vials today, not a bad take. Enough to meet her quota and afford a bus to Vancouver. City quests were more interesting than grinding out the same old monsters in the woods, and there were people in the city, if she happened to feel like people.

She didn't, usually.

The cabin had been a hunting cabin once, then a grow op, then a place the owner rented to whoever would put up with the road, and Rat put up with the road. She had a wood stove, a bed, a table, a stack of milk crates full of clothes and books, and a satellite dish bolted to a stump out front that cost more per month than the cabin did. That was the only bill that mattered. The stove ran on whatever she could split and the water came from a well. She had lived there for two years, since she was seventeen, and in that time she had had visitors exactly twice, both of them the landlord.

She took her frames off and set them on the table and rubbed her eyes. Outside the window the actual snow was falling on the actual trees, and the snowbolds had been standing in it a minute ago. It was the trick of The World, and nobody could ever quite explain it to people who hadn't played. The monsters were in the woods– not in a picture of the woods, but in the woods themselves. You went out in your boots and got wet to the knee and came home with vials.

Rat was nineteen. She was six feet and change and built like a coat hanger, with a long jaw and long hands and a voice she had worked on for years and still didn't entirely trust in front of strangers. She had done all of it herself, the way she did everything. There had been pills ordered from a pharmacy in a country she had never been to and paid for with vials, and a doctor in Vancouver who did not ask a lot of questions and charged accordingly, and two years of electrolysis paid for in cash, one session at a time, on the days when the kobolds were generous. Her body was the most expensive thing she had ever built. It wasn't finished, and it might never be, but it was hers, and nobody had given it to her.

And then there was the other one.

Her avatar was a ranger, tall, which was easy, and broad, which was not, with a short dark beard and a jaw like a shovel and a way of standing that she had tuned in the character editor over the course of a hundred idle hours, until he looked like a man who had never once in his life wondered how he was standing. On the forums they called him he. In match chat they called him bro. There was a running argument on one of the fan wikis about whether Rat was Canadian or American, and another about whether Rat was one player or a team, and in four years neither thread had ever gotten around to any other question about who Rat might be.

She let them. It was easier, and in the beginning it had been a good deal more than easier– it had been a place to go. When she was fifteen and living in her parents' basement, and the only person she had ever told had told her that she was confused, she had gone into The World every night and been a tall man with a beard, because a tall man with a beard was what everyone was already telling her she was, and in there, at least, she could be good at it. Then the years went by and she got better at both things, better at the game and better at being a woman in a cabin in the woods with no one around to see it. The man with the beard stayed. She was too good with him to start over.

She thought about it more than she would have liked to. She had built a body that looked like her with her own money, and she rented a second one for free that looked like what she had left behind, and she was a great deal more famous in the second one. It was a joke at her own expense, and she had never found anyone to tell it to.

Rat was a name she had given herself. She told people it was like a tattoo, which was true. Rats were smart and sweet and resourceful, and everybody hated them without ever having met one. She had been called worse things, and she had decided at some point to get there first.

Her parents were a phone number she had deleted.

She put another log in the stove, ate cold rice out of the pot, and lay down on the bed with her boots on to plan the next day. The forecast said clear. Clear meant trolls, up the logging road, and trolls meant a lot of vials if she didn't get her head caved in. Her rank was second in the world and had been for a year. The one person ahead of her was in Seoul and practiced eight hours a day in a gym full of coaches, and she practiced alone in the snow for rent money. She was going to have to fix that at some point.

Not tonight. Tonight she put her frames back on, dimmed the world to black, lay very still, and went to see what the market was paying for ice.