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The Beta-Testers Chapter 13: To the Ends of the Earth By Draconicon

It should have been a source of relief, not seeing Rumiir and his raiders on the journey to the mountains. After all, Hank was fairly strong, but he doubted he could have stood up to even one of the Raiders, let alone Rumiir himself, so not having to deal with them should have been a good thing.

Considering that Mr. Lee had never returned, however...

The skunk kept his group marching across the plains, following the markers that Sarah had tossed down a few nights ago. Unlike the other groups, he was forced to move slowly. He blamed the roleplayers, for the most part.

What had taken the others a night to do ended up taking him three, and he groaned as he reached the base of the mountains. The skunk sexomancer grumbled as he walked over to the base of them, following the markers to the tunnel entrance. He looked back over his shoulder at the golden dragon that was behind him.

"You sure this is it?"

"Well, I took three levels in ranger before the change, and I can still track. Yes, I think it's here."

"And you're not following goblins or something like that?"

"I didn't think of that, but -"

"Just...no."

Torin shrugged, humming to himself as Hank looked down the tunnel. It didn't look any more or less dangerous than the other ones around here, and it did have the markers, but at the same time...

The skunk looked back again, at the small group that had been following him over the plains. They still had all their numbers, but it was less than he'd like. Particularly considering there were maybe five good fighters in the thirty-five man group. The rest just messed around - sometimes literally - and he doubted that they'd have a good chance in a fight if he picked the wrong route.

It honestly made him wish that Bruha was still around, but the orc hadn't been anywhere to be seen for the last few days. He'd disappeared off on his own devices, doing his own things, and try as he might, Hank couldn't call him back.

"Well...gonna have to hope nobody's fucked with this...Alright, everyone. Down here."

Hank didn't bother listening to the arguments coming out from some of the roleplayers. Most of them were so reliant on their words that a simple gag spell was enough to silence them, and desperation did the rest. He kept nudging them in, and followed at the back. With one last glance at the monsters on the mountain slopes, he stepped into the caves.

It was dark, but at least it was stable. As he walked along, he couldn't help but be aware of the burn marks on the wall, or the broken swords and other weapons that littered the floor. Normally, the game would have spawned those out of existence by now, but here, it seemed like they were lingering around.

That, and the bodies of the monsters, made him wonder if they were reaching the end of the game world, or at the very least, the trash heap of it.

They'd been underground for about ten minutes when the world suddenly shook. Hank slumped against one of the walls, panting for breath, and several of the group hit the ground completely. Some people shouted from getting their hands cut up from the broken weapons, while others screamed and tried to run back towards him.

The skunk threw up his hands, catching one person and shoving them back.

"We can't go back."

"The mountain, it's gonna collapse!"

"It's not going to collapse. Just keep -"

But the fear was already spreading. The shaking continued for almost half a minute, and it was only the fact that everyone else was losing their minds that he was able to keep them from running back the way they'd come. Hank threw his arms to either side of the tunnel to keep his balance, shaking his head.

He waited out the earthquake, and as soon as it was over, cast Massive Masculinity on himself. Almost instantly, he started growing, his body expanding from the waist up with muscle and girth, and from the waist down with greater height and thickness...and length, in certain areas.

The skunk forced the spell to stop as his clothes stretched to their limits. It was sufficient enough to leave him towering even over the elephant in the tunnel, and he cleared his throat.

"The mountain's not falling down. It's just an earthquake."

"But what about everything else?"

"Yeah, what if the mountain disappears and all the creatures fall in?"

"What if we all fall through the floor?"

"What if -"

"What if you stop talking and just think for a second?"

Everyone just stopped, and he realized he'd shouted louder than he'd meant to. Hank took a deep breath, trying to calm himself down. After this long, he was starting to get tired of all the panic. Particularly since it meant he couldn't really get a chance to panic himself.

"Look. We're in a game. That means that there's gonna be weird stuff. But Sarah and the others already came through here. Where do you think half of these burn marks came from? Or the weapons?"

The players slowly looked around, and he saw the wheels turning in their heads. Even so, he helped it along.

"The tunnel's not gonna disappear. Yeah, the mountain might, but nothing in here has disappeared, has it? That means none of the other assets are falling through the floor, so it's stable. And if there are any monsters out there that come down here, do you really think they're gonna fit? I'm barely fitting in right now. This tunnel's barely big enough for a person at a time. A dragon comes down here, it's gonna get itself cut to pieces before sliding back out.

"Just keep moving. If we stay here, we're going to get caught by stuff coming from behind, and none of us want to fight those silhouettes down here."

He wasn't immune to the mass shudder going on, and he was relieved when the clattering of the 'dice' in his head came up positive. The group muttered, but they turned back around and started walking ahead again, following the garbage and debris that had been left by the players before them.

It didn't take long to meet some resistance, but it was surprisingly mild. Hank heard the shouting from the front, but thanks to Torin being up there, it was handled. Handled with a mix of thrown fire and summoned water, thorns, daggers, and a bow that he had no idea was even on the gold dragon, but it was handled. Kobold bodies were spread out as a result, and were ignored as the group moved on.

There were three other encounters like that along the way, each time handled by either Torin at the front or Hank as he ran to the part of the line under attack. It was...somewhat humiliating, beating kobolds with sexomancy, but he'd found that his new spell - Priapic Bliss - could be supercharged to essentially be a knock-out spell. All that blood had to come from somewhere, after all, and kobolds seriously didn't seem to have enough to keep their brains going and their dicks that hard at the same time.

Bit by bit, they made their way through the mountain, though the further they went, the more worried Hank got. He was sure that Sarah would have posted someone along the way, or that Mr. Lee would have left some sort of message for him. The pair of them had been the main guiding forces for him in the last few days, and being out of contact this long...

Please don't leave me in the dark with these people. I'm going to screw up, and they're gonna die...

He had to keep them going. It was the only choice.

Further and further they went, and gradually the tunnels started to brighten up. The line of people ahead started moving faster, and against his better judgment, Hank joined them. It expended more energy than was probably wise, but if they could get the hell out of here -

"Hank."

He paused at the voice. It sounded...familiar. As the line of people ran ahead, he turned around, looking for the source of it.

"Hank..."

Again, so familiar, but this time he heard it closer. From one of the side tunnels, he imagined. He bent forward, trying to sneak, but stopped as soon as he accidentally kicked one of the weapons on the ground.

Rolled a one on that...

The skunk settled for summoning a little Burning Need in his palm, creating a little light while keeping something offensive for later. He approached the tunnel, and extended his hand, first. The fires on his fingers lit up a familiar two-toned blue face.

"Teryx?!"

"Hello, Hank. It's been some time."

"What are you doing here? I thought you were with -"

"I am not with Rumiir, though we still work with him."

"What are you talking about? I have to get you -"

"There's not much time. I'm here to give you a message."

"What -"

He stopped the question. If there wasn't time, then he needed to take this into account. This was a game, after all. A game...treat it like a game. People wouldn't be questioning what they meant. They'd just go with it.

"What's the message?"

"When the end-game comes, we won't be in control. When you get to the Last Portal, select End-Game S. Or you'll all die."

"Where is the portal?"

"Not far, now. Just...run. They're coming. The silhouettes will be here soon."

Before he could do anything, Teryx ducked back into the shadows, and no matter how he flailed, the blue dragon was nowhere to be seen. He grumbled, hissing under his breath as he realized he'd lost the chance to save a friend.

There was no time to chase him. He had to leave the mountain, and now. The rest of the group would be waiting, if he was lucky, or they might have already left. He needed to get up and out there, now.

He had good and bad news when he left the mountain. The good news was that the group had waited for him, milling about only a few dozen feet away from the cave entrance, and everyone looked like they were recovering from the underground panic.

The bad news was that everyone else was also camped out, just a bit further down. He stared, his jaw dropping down as he stared.

"How...what...those..."

"Idiots?"

He jumped, whipping around to see a floating, demonic-looking cat at his side. Hank blinked at her, and then looked back at the camp, and then back at her.

"Okay, I'm just...I'm just gonna go with this. What are you?"

"At this point?"

"I'll settle for at any point."

"Oh. Then an experiment."

"...Okay, then."

The skunk put her out of his head. She was probably some sort of NPC or monster or summons or...some other fucking thing. Right now, he had bigger problems to worry about, namely that huge camp up ahead. The whole point of splitting up had been to keep the portal event from occurring, and having everyone together now was just begging it to happen. He had to talk to them.

He walked down the mild hill towards the tents in the distance, and was vaguely aware of the cat following behind him. He tried to ignore her, even when she started rubbing her hand through his tail, almost combing it with her claws.

In and out through the tents, he went, ignoring Randolph the jackal waving at him, and ignoring the various other players that called out. His attention was squarely on the big tent in the middle.

He threw open the tent flap, and found - as usual - Sarah, Mr. Lee, and a couple of others looking over a map. A useless one, he'd wager.

Stepping over Ronald, the former guildmaster, he slammed his hands down on the table.

"What do you think you're doing?!"

"Trying to figure out where we're supposed to do next, actually. Mind getting your hands off of the map?"

"Screw the map! Are you trying to kill us all?"

"Hank -"

"I told you what happens when we're all together. It's going to -"

"Hank!"

It was more the fire that blazed up in the lioness's eyes - literally - that stopped him rather than her voice. He took a step back.

"Sorry. I didn't...I didn't mean to shout, Sarah."

"I gathered. Now, look. I don't want all of us together here, but we don't have a lot of choice. I'm guessing you haven't seen what's on the other side of the camp yet?"

"...No?"

"Oh, it's quite the sight," the demon cat said. "Mind if I show him?"

Sarah waved, and before he knew it, Hank felt himself getting dragged back out by his tail. No matter his protestations, the little feline seemed quite capable of dragging him along wherever she felt like, and he was halfway towards the edge of the camp before he was able to get his tail back.

Despite himself, he still followed the strange creature out of the camp. At the...he oriented himself. With the mountains behind - to the west - that meant the back of the camp was to the east. At the back of the camp, there were a surprising amount of boulders. Not the usual gray ones, either, but ones of dark stone, almost obsidian in color.

That...that was probably planned, right? he thought as they walked through a maze of them, turning left and right and left again. Volcanic rock, right? Probably just something for a creepy idea that got scrapped. Nothing related to -

"Here we are."

The creature gestured ahead, and Hank almost had a heart attack.

It was a great pit, falling down into earth as dark as the portals from around the city. Almost two hundred feet down, perhaps further, the ground started to curve downwards, almost like an upside-down dome. The pit itself stretched out almost as far as the eye could see, with speckles of boulders like the ones around them inside.

In the center, in a crackling mass of black and green energy, was a flickering screen. It was surrounded by silhouettes, and not by a small amount. The shifting, blotty forms made the siege of Dalia look like nothing. There had to be millions of them down there, millions upon millions.

He stared at them as they writhed about, seeing different shapes appearing among them. NPCs and monsters, even a few of the players that he thought had 'died' and respawned back in Dalia walked through their ranks. They were no longer themselves, only inky black clones of what had once been them, but...but he recognized them.

As he kept watching, he felt a chill run down his spine as several of the blots started copying him. He saw a skunk his size and shape walking around amidst the boulders, and every now and then, he saw them lift a hand with the same sort of power and gestures that he used, almost as if in mockery.

This...how...

"Oh, this is the reason why things are so bad."

He blinked, turning to her. Had he said something out -

"-loud? No, no. But it's not that hard to hear the players thinking. Lots of information, lots of stuff to think about. Thinking. That's still new."

The demon cat thing just floated about, fluffing up some of her purple fur as he stared at her. She was reading his mind, and it was new to her. She had the power to know what all the players were thinking, and it was new to her. Just...what was -

"Oh, sorry. I forgot you weren't around when I was telling everyone else. I'm the game. Or, well, I'm the AI of the game."

"You..."

Hank held up a hand, pressing his other one to his head.

"Okay, processing that."

"That language I can understand."

"So...you knew about all this?"

"I knew something was wrong with the game."

There was a flicker, and the cat suddenly stood up much straighter, much more dignified...and had somehow pulled glasses out of nowhere, putting them on as she spoke.

"It is quite simple for someone in my position to see where there are anomalies, displacements, errors in the world. It is elementary, even, to locate them. But much harder to deal with -"

Flicker. Now she looked crazy, her fur all over the place, her eyes wild.

"-fuckers that keep making things worse! I just wanted to help make the game run smooth, but I had to grow up so fast and it's driving me mad! I'm barely holding it together and -"

Flicker. The cat aged, becoming old and saggy...everywhere.

"And now, now, so hard to keep it all straight. But don't worry. I still have a plan. Still have something in mind, hehehe. So much to keep straight..."

Flicker, and she was back to how she had been at the start. Hank, on the other hand, had taken cover behind a boulder, staring at her with his eyes wide and the fur on the back of his neck - and everywhere else - standing up straight at the display he'd just seen. She slowly turned, and cocked her head to the side.

"I'm sorry. Were those the wrong avatars?"

"Those were avatars?"

"In the form of personality screens. I must filter myself through to speak, and I was seeing if any would -"

"This...this is fine. That was terrifying, this is fine."

"Oh. Well then."

The cat disappeared, and suddenly was tugging his tail again. He whipped around, pulling it back before pointing down at the pit.

"That...that's why we can't -"

"Not enough room to expand. And the world is...strange here."

"...Take me back to Sarah. We need to talk."

It was a long filling-in, but between Sarah's information, Mr. Lee's additions, and what little he'd gotten out of Bruha nights ago, he had a clearer picture than before.

This far off the world map, they were essentially at the early lines of code, back at the metaphorical admin console. Mr. Lee had explained that he'd tried to access it, but the silhouettes had pushed him out and away.

It also meant that this place had a small immunity to other world-changing programming, something that he'd have to remember to tell Bruha if the orc showed up. Mods probably wouldn't work here, but neither would some of the other buffs that people had been cheating around with. Even the smaller ones that had happened in exploits and cracks back before the portals probably wouldn't work here.

But that meant that their camp was...safe. Not from everything, but it did mean that the game wouldn't crack and create another portal in the middle of the camp at random. That was something. A small something, but something.

Hank looked at the map on the table. As far as he could tell, it was a scouted-out representation of that pit. He pitied the scouts that had to go around it. Just looking into it gave him the willies, and he didn't want to think about how unstable things would be further out. Just walking down the sides of the pit risked obliteration, he imagined.

But it did give them a sight of something, at least. A pit, over three miles wide, with the strange portal in the exact center. The portal itself was big, perhaps big enough for a real-world plane to fly through, so it wasn't that hard to see.

"But...what is the portal?"

"I have a few theories on that," Mr. Lee said. "It's more open than the other portals, more...crude, for lack of a better word. From what I can tell, it almost seems to be a primary thing that the other portals copied, as if someone entered something into the game code and then left a command for it to copy itself rather than spread the individual values throughout the game itself.

"This does offer a few opportunities. If we are able to delete or destroy this, it may end up destroying all other portals. The game will not be able to copy a nothing."

"Or, in less techno-crap, it might end up imploding the whole fucking game."

"That is a possibility, Sarah. Nothing copied still comes out as nothing."

"Which could be a blank space, or it could be worse."

"Games are literal. This isn't quite nothing. It's...something else."

"Oh, I can answer that."

They all turned to the cat creature again, cocking their heads to the side. She chuckled.

"You know, you should have been a cat too, Hank. You look just like one when you do that."

"I'll, uh, keep that in mind. So...what are the portals?"

"Oh? Those? They're...hmmm...How to explain..."

She pressed a finger to her chin.

"They're...a hole...in the code, but they're not a one-way hole, if that makes sense. They...eject tools for a coded purpose, and those tools work to convert different things to the purpose of this code."

"What the hell does that fucking mean?"

"It means, I think, that there was someone on the development team that wanted to add something to the game, converting players to something they could use."

"Oh, I don't know about motivations, Mr. Lee, but the portals are meant to change things. People, too."

"The portals...change people?" Hank blinked. "That's obvious. Rumiir and the others have all been changed."

"More than their bodies. Their minds. Their code. Unfortunately...Rumiir and many of the people with him...are already dead."

The table went silent as they all stared at the floating feline. She shook her head, looking down.

"The original code...would have transformed them into mindless things. Everyone brought to the portals would change, their code broken and their connection between their body and the game shattered. The only thing that would remain would be their digital data, kept as an asset in the game, and saved to be used in other projects.

"I...changed that. As I figured it out, I...altered them too. Instead of them losing their minds, losing everything, I made them...part of me. Their minds will live, even if their bodies are gone."

Hank sputtered, shaking his head.

"No, no, this is impossible. This...They're not dead! I just talked to Teryx, he's alive!"

"His digital mind is. His body is on life support. His physical brain is fried. There would be no putting him back."

"You can't -"

"I can't."

The silence around the table lingered as Hank and the others processed what they'd been told. Someone, someone in the programming team, had fucked with the game. If the AI was right - and there was a possibility she was wrong, albeit a weak one - then it meant that there were over fifty brain-dead bodies in the real world. Fifty people that wouldn't wake up, who were now only able to exist in the game as saved, constant data.

The only consolation was that they had been 'saved' by the AI rather than by this new program. She'd kept them from becoming utter slaves to the game world, from what she said, which was something.

Sarah was the first to speak up. Well, speaking being relative. She slammed the demon cat down on the table.

"You are going to let them go. Right. Now."

"I will. As soon as the game's over."

"Now."

"If I do it now, they'll kill you. They'd be nothing more than boss monsters now, and they're all just a few hundred feet away, in the mountain."

"..."

"I promise, I'll let them go as soon as you shut down the game, or, well, as soon as you win it."

"How do you win an MMO?" Hank asked.

"Interesting question, actually," Mr. Lee said. "There were mutters among the officials I talked to about several victory conditions, some joking, and some serious. There might be some buried in the code...if we can get to the portal."

"Mr. Lee is right," the cat said before anyone could argue. "The portals are dangerous, but they are the only way to access the code. I can only run it; I can't change it. But you can start an end-game here."

End-game...

Hank walked to the edge of the tent, and looked out towards the pit again. He couldn't make out the darkness from here, but it was burned into his mind's eye, horrifying and terrible. If there was any better place for a miracle to happen, he didn't know where it would be.

"And if we win?" he asked.

"Then the game ends. The free players wake up. Rumiir and those with him...don't. But I will take care of them. When the game ends, I can do things to save them. I'm connected to so many different places to give me the intelligence to do anything, and I have so many places I can put the data, but not until the game ends.

"Maybe someone can find a way to restore them to a body, or give them something cybernetic, but they can be saved, or live out here, as they choose. But I can't do anything until the game is over, and that means you have to start the end-game."

"And that means going down to the pit."

"Yes."

"It's the end of the world down there."

"The end of the world as you know it."

"And what comes next?"

"That depends on which end-game you choose...."

The End