Mundis Mori: A LitRPG Adventure Read online

  MUNDIS MORI

  Justin Coke

  Copyright 2017 by Justin Coke

  Chapter One

  Silence,[1] then the delayed click as the computer sensed someone had said hello on the other end of the line. “May I speak to Mr. Adams?”

  Call terminated.

  Click.

  “May I speak to Ms. Walters?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m Hayes calling from Dreamweaver Internet. We specialize in delivering high quality wireless internet to rural areas. Are you tired of paying ridiculous prices for dialup connection speeds? Dreamweaver can help.”

  “I moved to Chicago. Put me on the no-call list,”

  “Of cou—” Silence.

  F9. Arrow down. Ms. Walters was put on the no-call list. Maybe. It worked about 50% of the time. Five percent of the time a glitch in the system bumped her up to the top of the call list about every two hours. But that, Hayes thought, was someone else’s problem, most likely Ms. Walter’s.

  He glanced at the clock in the corner of his computer. Only one minute had passed since the last time he’d checked the time.

  Sixty-four minutes to go to the end of his shift. Only 3840 seconds. 3830. 3825. God, counting in seconds just made it worse.

  “Hello, this is Hayes. I’m calling from Dreamweaver Internet,” he said. There was no one on the line, he’d just been startled by someone dropping a stapler and blurted it out. He’d said it once when a cashier handed him change.

  He looked at his feet and dreamed of logging in to Mundis. He was so close to getting his mount; just turn in a couple of quests he’d finished that morning before work, and he’d be level 30. His warlock, Rabaul, got a ridable demon horse ten levels before everyone else, and he was so excited. Walking was so slow. The mount would change everything.

  He’d read up on the quest to get the mount. It was a simple “go to destination, have money” quest. He had the money. He’d earned it laundering Sorathi Crystals for multi-boxing Chinese gold farmers. They liked to put legitimate accounts in the middle of the Term-of-Service-violating black market, where people traded real world cash for stuff like Sorathi Crystals.[2] Using real accounts helped mask their activities from the sysadmins.[3]Technically he’d risked losing Rabaul altogether, since getting caught got your account banned. But it saved him countless hours of grinding gold the old fashioned way, and he was on a mission to get mobile.

  “Hello, this is Hayes from Dreamweaver Internet.”

  “Motherfucker,” someone snarled as they hung up.

  “Dickhead,” Hayes muttered. Click. He tried to hold on to the fantasy of Rabaul riding his magnificent demon steed through three calls, before his manager came up to him.

  “Come with me,” Rick said.

  Hayes knew he was in trouble, but he followed him into the half-shielded cubicle that counted as an office here.

  “Dreamweaver was listening to your calls. They heard you call someone a dickhead.”

  “He wasn’t on the line.”

  “There is no profanity on the floor.”

  “He called me a motherfucker!”

  “They can’t fire him. They can fire you.”

  “I’m fired?”

  Rick nodded. “Reapply in a month. I’ll move you over to the credit card customer support section. But I have to fire you and you’ll never work the Dreamweaver contract again.”

  “What about unemployment?”

  “Unemployment is for people who didn’t get fired for cause. If you try to get it, you’ll lose. And then I won’t be able to rehire you.”

  “How am I supposed to make rent?”

  Rick shrugged. “It’s out of my hands. I’m doing everything I can for you. If I thought Dreamweaver would ever figure out I brought you back, I wouldn’t even be able to do that.”

  Hayes opened his mouth to protest.

  “Pack up your shit and go,” Rick said. “All you can do now is make it worse for you.”

  That was how Hayes ended up starting the quest for his mount an hour early. He turned in his quests, leveled up, and went to his class trainer. He held his breath, hoping for one of the easier of the five variations of the quest.

  Congratulations, young Warlock. Your achievements have been as impressive as they are numerous. You have earned your Demonsteed as much as any Warlock ever has. Ibis the Wicked will help you summon your steed, if you provide 100 gold pieces to cover the expenses of the summoning. Ibis lives in a cave outside of the Ki’la’a, in the Barren Desert.[4]

  His heart sank; the worst possible variation.[5] The Barren Desert was in Squalid territory, and his faction, the Palladium Fraternity,[6] was always in a vicious, all-out war with the Squalids. Going to Squalid territory would be like wearing a steak suit in a tiger cage. He began to type a message to the other members of the Rockchalk, his guild. At first he’d been excited to be a member, but he was starting to realize that Rockchalk[7] was well past a prime that had never been that impressive in the first place. Next time he wouldn’t join a guild that had to advertise for members. Still, this was exactly what guilds were for—you helped people when they were in a jam, and they helped you. He’d put in his dues, as little good as a level 30 could.

  Rabaul: Got humped on my mount quest, it’s in Kilaa.

  Guild: [Nothing]

  Rabaul: I need help.

  Guild: [Nothing]

  Rabaul: I know you guys are seeing this. You going to help me or not?

  Guild: [Nothing]

  Rabaul: /gquit

  Mundis: Are you sure?

  Hayes furiously clicked yes.

  Mundis: You have left Rockchalk.

  “Fuck those useless assholes,” he said. He went to the bank, took off all his clothes, and deposited them in his vault. When you died, like he was going to die many times, your killer would steal everything you had on you. He made his way, butt naked, to the dock. He could pay a gold for a Graverobber’s Curse[8] potion, which would prevent the theft of his gear. But where he was going he’d have no hope of winning a fight with or without his armor, so there was no point to wasting the money. The boat would come soon and transport him to Freeport,[9] a neutral city fifty miles from Ki’la’a. It was unlikely that anyone would bother him there, as disruption of the market was frowned upon. After he left he would be a piñata for every max level Squalid who came across him. A Palladium in their territory meant they were basically morally obligated to murder him. The Barren Desert was a very low level zone, ten and below, which meant he could safely deal with the monsters that lived there, so his hope was to slip into the woods and move through the woods, invisible to the high-level characters who would be flying down the road on their glorious warhorses. Freeport was a dump populated by Non-Player goblins and ogres. While the surroundings were squalid, Freeport was actually a hub of very lucrative smuggling since there were no police officers to enforce the Terms of Service. Unlike other games, in Mundis no transaction was impossible, though many were forbidden. Illegal transactions were recorded in your dirt file, and only if the police arrested you was the dirt file opened. Only then did the consequences of your actions (exile, punitive taxation, imprisonment) land on your character. Dirt decayed over time and eventually left your dirt file.

  It was that sort of attention to detail that made Hayes play Mundis—he enjoyed the feeling he got when he walked past a towering NPC police officer, knowing that his dirt file would get him in trouble if only the officer had probable cause to open it. However, as with so many things, the gamers had made the game less fun by working around the rules.

  They used multi-boxing, or running the game on several computers all logged into different accounts, to get around the syst
em. Their dirt accounts, as they called them, were only logged in when it was time to commit a crime, and they only existed in towns like Freeport, where the police didn’t exist. They were essentially beyond the law.

  As a result, the town was full of people from every faction, but they were empty shells that only existed to commit the monetary crimes the primary character didn’t want to carry in their dirt file.

  In short, Freeport was a hub of Chinese gold miners, smugglers, traitors, and everybody else who made their living violating the Terms of Service, which amounted to every serious player in the game. He knew that one day he would be here, wheeling and dealing in stolen goods, contraband, selling war resources to the enemy, speculating in bizarre three-way currency schemes that could make you rich one day and in debtor’s prison[10] the next, and arranging underhanded and wildly illegal alliances that coalesced out of real world communications and secret payoffs. He longed for that day as much as he’d ever wanted anything.For now, he was only a level 30. He had 70 to go before he could even begin to be taken seriously by the heavy hitters of Mundis. To the degree he was worth noticing, people probably assumed he was either a noob who had just been robbed by a sadistic ganker or the frontman for a smuggler. Some, perhaps, smart enough to piece together why a low-level Palladium warlock would be in Freeport, would realize he was just an unfortunate who wanted a horse.

  Before he left town he mailed the money to himself to prevent it from being stolen along the way. Ibis had a mailbox.

  Chapter Two

  He thought he’d slipped into the jungle around Freeport without attracting attention. He believed it right until the ice bolt slammed into the top of his head, killing him instantly. The bolt was so powerful it would have killed him ten times over. A Squalid mage, who looked a bit like a pile of half-cooked calamari schwarma with four little legs, leapt down from a tree, and squatted on his head again and again. His name, Teabagz, glowed over his head. He was a member of the Squid Pistols guild. Hayes had never heard of them, but Teabagz was in full Tier 2, as unimpressive as it looked on a tentacled stack of melted pancakes. Teabagz was way too rich to be hanging out in the jungle waiting for people to gank. He must have seen him leave Freeport and come out here just to torture him.

  He released his body and began the run back to his body. When he got there, Teabagz was gone.

  Mundis: Would you like to Resurrect?

  Hayes clicked yes.

  His body, weak and mostly dead, appeared, while his corpse turned into a skeleton. He sat to accelerate healing.

  Suddenly he turned into a sheep. Teabagz appeared, the spell of invisibility disappearing with a burst of light as he completed the transformation spell.

  Teabagz waddled over to his sheep-like body and made a lewd humping motion.

  Teabagz set him ablaze, and Hayes began to run, still a sheep, until he died. His smoldering corpse lay beneath a palm tree, and there Hayes left it.

  Hayes went down to the kitchen and drank a soda.

  Ganking[11] like that was a part of the game; he’d expected it. Not so soon, but that was fine. He couldn’t beat Teabagz in a fight, but he had a weapon of his own: boredom. He’d wait Teabagz out. Gankers were looking for cheap fun; half an hour of watching his corpse, and not knowing when he’d come back, would take care of Teabagz, who would wander off to pick the legs off of ants or jack off to the yearbook photo of some girl he’d didn’t have the balls to talk to. Two episodes of Futurama later, he returned, walked back to his body, and resurrected. He ate and started walking.

  Teabagz, riding his horse, came over a ridge and ran Hayes down. Instant death. The horse reared in the air, hooves bloody,[12] and Teabagz waved at Rabaul’s corpse.

  “Fuck you! Oh my god! Fuck!” Hayes would have paid real money to have a character that could beat Teabagz. He took another break, muttering and cursing.

  He resurrected half an hour later. Surely, by now, Teabagz had gotten tired of killing him. He walked a good distance, checking all around him, especially the trees, and he saw nothing. He made it a mile, then two, when he saw the mounted figure on the ridge.

  He sat down, waiting to die. The figure rode up—a Paladin of the Palladium Fraternity! Hayes felt relief wash over him.

  Oji: What happened to you?[13]Rabaul: Mount quest. Trying to get to to Kilala. Some fucker is ganking me.

  Oji: Need a ride?

  Rabaul: Oh god, thank you. He’s in Tier 2.

  Oji: Who is it?

  Rabaul: Teabagz.

  Oji: That jerk? He PVP’s like my grandma and he knows it. He’ll leave us alone.

  Rabaul: Thank you so much!

  Hayes hopped on Oji’s mount, and they rode miles in minutes, until they came to a giant hole in the ground. Oji froze up.

  Oji: Think I’m getting disconnected. Wait here.

  Rabaul: ok.

  Oji locked up, then disappeared. A minute later, Rabaul turned into a sheep again. Teabagz! Teabagz pushed him down the hole, and the fall damage did him in at the bottom. It was a deep hole; too deep to resurrect at the top. If he resurrected at the bottom he would be trapped there until someone came by to rescue him; this deep into Squalid territory that would be like winning the lottery. Hayes flushed with panic, but then he remembered Oji would be back; he would save him.

  Oji: You got Teabagzed.

  Rabaul: Help me.

  Oji: You’re a fucking idiot.

  Rabaul: What?

  Oji: I’m Teabagz. I brought you to to this hole so I could leave your corpse at the bottom, you noob. Good luck getting out. Peace out.

  Rabaul: Why?

  Oji: A warlock killed my dog. Or was it my mom? I forget.

  Rabaul: I didn’t kill your dog!

  Oji: jfc you twat

  Hayes picked up his computer, ready to throw it into the wall, when he remembered: if he broke his computer, he’d have no way to find Teabagz. If he couldn’t find Teabagz, he couldn’t get revenge.

  He was going to find Teabagz, and he was going to steal every piece of armor he had, every gold coin he had—he was going to ruin Teabagz. He would skin Teabagz and wear his face to Christmas parties. He never felt hate this pure before, and it was wonderful.

  Using an alternate character—a warrior he’d found too boring to play full time—he used what little he had in the bank to talk a Warlock into summoning Rabaul. Payment made, he logged out of the alt and logged back into Rabaul.

  The invite from the mercenary came, to his relief. He was more than a little afraid that it was yet another Teabagz alt, and he’d be summoned to the heart of a volcano or something terrible like that, but this was the only way he could see of getting Rabaul out of that pit.

  Mundis: You have been summoned. Do you accept?

  He clicked yes, and he was back in Londinium, the home city of the Palladium Fraternity. He was safe, but well over an hour of travel, by foot, back to Kai’la’la.

  Teabagz, Mage, Squid Pistols, Squalid. Aka Oji, Paladin, Mambo Kings, Palladium Fraternity. The biggest bully douche in the history of gaming, which had to put him in the running for biggest living douche, maybe pretty high in the all-time historical douche rankings. He wasn’t even worried about the Demonsteed anymore; that was simply a thing he would need to defeat Teabagz now, one of a thousand things he would need.

  Know your enemy, Hayes thought, and went to the Mundis forums. Somebody had talked about Teabagz; there was no way Rabaul was his first victim. There would be people who shared his hate. They would help him.

  Rokosakhan Teabagz is a CockWalrus

 

  This son of a bitch comes to me, tells me he’s in the know, how the Squalids are going to reave the Breadbasket in two weeks, and if I put up the cash to help him funnel money to his cross-faction account, he’d use it to buy Palladium grain futures, split the profits with me 50/50. So I do. Not only do the Squalids not reave the Breadbasket, they broker a fucking trade agreement where they give Palladium 500 tons of grain in exchange for so
me steel!

  He tells me we lost everything but I don’t think he bought any futures. I think he bought that fancy Tier 2 helm! Come to find out, Teabagz was on the diplo team that made that agreement!

  __________________________________

  Teabagz

 

  Two steps to get your money back, Rokosakhan.

  1)git

  2)gud

  ___________________________________

  Barleybutt

 

  Your first mistake was to trust Teabagz. He makes his money off of ripping off noobs like you, his crew of ass-licking sycophants, and being the front man to the Chinese RMT gangs that are the real power in this game. Don’t feel too bad, cause of him I went from owning a two-hundred-acre apple orchard to having to beg vendor trash from guildies so I could get the gear score to do courier runs. Fuck that guy, don’t touch him or anybody with the name. Half of them are just his alts, and the other half lick his ass like it’s a Tootsie Pop.

  ________________________________________

  Teabagz

 

  Barleybutt, I don’t remember any of that. For you, the day Teabagz graced your orchard was the most important day of your life. For me, it was Tuesday. Are you the one with the delicious peaches and the weakness for Ponzi schemes, or the one who bet against me cornering the wine market?

  ________________________________________

  The thread degenerated even further into insults and memes from there.

  Chapter Three

  The summary of the official forums on Teabagz was that he was a first-class asshole who enjoyed watching his victims suffer. So, nothing Hayes didn’t already know. So Hayes went to MundisdeMundis.com, the unofficial forum for all the discussions that would get you banned for violating the TOS on the official forums.

  General Discussion

  Realm Forums

  Class Forums

  Warlock

  Rogue

  Berserker

  Warrior

  Mage

  Paladin