Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from nother Mike: The handball court looked different after the grenades went off…
My first thought was "an act of war, or of terrorism?"
And then I thought maybe it would be something in "NPC's." Since they're in cyberspace, all damage is casually repairable, by rebooting the storyscape, respawning the NPC's and restoring the player characters' avatars.
Maybe it could involve taking stuff from one game world into another, and be one of the devs' first signs that something more is going on than the incident at Pirate Island.
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Griefer for Hire
Toni was just sitting down at the kitchen table with Roger when the head of Development sent through an emergency push notification. Sanjay didn't even have the grace to pipe it in via a simulation of her cellphone, just forced it straight into her mind so hard it would've disoriented her if she'd been operating in meatspace.
Here in cyberspace, the watchdog program kept the shock from affecting her physical equilibrium - but Roger still noticed at once.
“Toni, what's wrong?”
“Griefer attack on the Academy game.”
At least this time Roger knew what she meant. Toni still remembered when she first mentioned it and Roger thought it was a game set at Annapolis. She'd fought down the urge to laugh as she explained about the novels of the boy wizard and his friends at a magical boarding school, and how it had spawned a whole genre of fantasy and sf literature and games set in schools. But it had been yet another bit of proof that Roger wasn't just an NPC she'd programmed, but an actual Navy officer from the previous century.
“What happened?”
“Sanjay's keeping the details off the 'Net, probably because our connection isn't 100% secure. But he's calling an all-hands investigation. Every dev, unless you're on a Class-1 Urgent task.”
Roger reached for the Apollo jacket that was hanging over one of the chairs. “Do they need me?”
Of course he would jump right in to help. Toni still remembered reading about how he'd fallen behind in earning his own Boy Scout badges because he was so busy helping the younger kids earn theirs.
“No, this is employees only. Management would consider it too sensitive to have freelancers poking around.” Picking up Roger's disappointment, Toni added, “But I can get you a subchannel on my link with Digital Dreams' servers, so you can see if there's anything significant.”
Of course it meant that Roger would be seeing everything through Toni's point of view, like an old-fashioned first-person shooter game. But having his support would be useful right now, since he often noticed things that slipped right past her.”
Using the programmers' backdoor, there was no sense of travel through cyberspace. One moment she was in the kitchen of the little bubble house on the Moon, and the next she was standing on the school grounds of the Academy game. The huge gothic monstrosity that was the Contra Costa School of Magic loomed over the hedges. Supposedly it was based upon the Winchester House in San Jose, although with magical touches like rooms that reconfigured themselves or wandered through the structure, being behind one door now and another door a few days later.
The devs were easy to pick out among the crowd - they made no effort whatsoever to look like students of any grade level. They were all clustering around the handball courts - or what was left of them.
Huge divots had been torn out of the playing surfaces, and the nets lying flat or in a tangled shambles with pieces of asphalt mixed in with them. At least there was no evidence that anybody had been hurt - but any player's watchdog software would've prevented psychosomatic transference of game injuries, and it was relatively easy to repair injuries to one's avatar. NPC's would just be terminated and respawned, since this was most explicitly not a combat game.
Toni looked for familiar faces in the crowd, since devs usually didn't get creative with their avatars when they were on the job. “What happened?”
Levi pulled her aside. “Far as we know, the griefer was using some kind of illegal mods and cheat codes to bring a bunch of hand grenades out of Mekong Mighty Fighters and started throwing them like they were handballs.”
Most of Toni's experience with this sort of thing was people taking modern weapons from the combat games to the fantasy games. There were good reasons for the restrictions on moving game objects from one storyscape to another, and not just because it unbalanced play. “That's a permaban offense.”
“Damn straight it is, but first we have to figure out who the player is. I'm hearing that the office people are claiming they're finding that the account was set up with a stolen credit card and a VPN that makes it impossible to even locate where the player is logging in from.”
=========================================================================================
From here it'll go to Roger's discovery that the griefer is in fact a mercenary, and how they trace him back to Sierra's father, who's trying to create a false flag attack. But with everything that was going on in my life this week, I didn't get the time I'd wanted to work on it. But now that it's definitely part of "NPC's," it will get finished.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.
My first thought was "an act of war, or of terrorism?"
And then I thought maybe it would be something in "NPC's." Since they're in cyberspace, all damage is casually repairable, by rebooting the storyscape, respawning the NPC's and restoring the player characters' avatars.
Maybe it could involve taking stuff from one game world into another, and be one of the devs' first signs that something more is going on than the incident at Pirate Island.
==========================================================================================
Griefer for Hire
Toni was just sitting down at the kitchen table with Roger when the head of Development sent through an emergency push notification. Sanjay didn't even have the grace to pipe it in via a simulation of her cellphone, just forced it straight into her mind so hard it would've disoriented her if she'd been operating in meatspace.
Here in cyberspace, the watchdog program kept the shock from affecting her physical equilibrium - but Roger still noticed at once.
“Toni, what's wrong?”
“Griefer attack on the Academy game.”
At least this time Roger knew what she meant. Toni still remembered when she first mentioned it and Roger thought it was a game set at Annapolis. She'd fought down the urge to laugh as she explained about the novels of the boy wizard and his friends at a magical boarding school, and how it had spawned a whole genre of fantasy and sf literature and games set in schools. But it had been yet another bit of proof that Roger wasn't just an NPC she'd programmed, but an actual Navy officer from the previous century.
“What happened?”
“Sanjay's keeping the details off the 'Net, probably because our connection isn't 100% secure. But he's calling an all-hands investigation. Every dev, unless you're on a Class-1 Urgent task.”
Roger reached for the Apollo jacket that was hanging over one of the chairs. “Do they need me?”
Of course he would jump right in to help. Toni still remembered reading about how he'd fallen behind in earning his own Boy Scout badges because he was so busy helping the younger kids earn theirs.
“No, this is employees only. Management would consider it too sensitive to have freelancers poking around.” Picking up Roger's disappointment, Toni added, “But I can get you a subchannel on my link with Digital Dreams' servers, so you can see if there's anything significant.”
Of course it meant that Roger would be seeing everything through Toni's point of view, like an old-fashioned first-person shooter game. But having his support would be useful right now, since he often noticed things that slipped right past her.”
Using the programmers' backdoor, there was no sense of travel through cyberspace. One moment she was in the kitchen of the little bubble house on the Moon, and the next she was standing on the school grounds of the Academy game. The huge gothic monstrosity that was the Contra Costa School of Magic loomed over the hedges. Supposedly it was based upon the Winchester House in San Jose, although with magical touches like rooms that reconfigured themselves or wandered through the structure, being behind one door now and another door a few days later.
The devs were easy to pick out among the crowd - they made no effort whatsoever to look like students of any grade level. They were all clustering around the handball courts - or what was left of them.
Huge divots had been torn out of the playing surfaces, and the nets lying flat or in a tangled shambles with pieces of asphalt mixed in with them. At least there was no evidence that anybody had been hurt - but any player's watchdog software would've prevented psychosomatic transference of game injuries, and it was relatively easy to repair injuries to one's avatar. NPC's would just be terminated and respawned, since this was most explicitly not a combat game.
Toni looked for familiar faces in the crowd, since devs usually didn't get creative with their avatars when they were on the job. “What happened?”
Levi pulled her aside. “Far as we know, the griefer was using some kind of illegal mods and cheat codes to bring a bunch of hand grenades out of Mekong Mighty Fighters and started throwing them like they were handballs.”
Most of Toni's experience with this sort of thing was people taking modern weapons from the combat games to the fantasy games. There were good reasons for the restrictions on moving game objects from one storyscape to another, and not just because it unbalanced play. “That's a permaban offense.”
“Damn straight it is, but first we have to figure out who the player is. I'm hearing that the office people are claiming they're finding that the account was set up with a stolen credit card and a VPN that makes it impossible to even locate where the player is logging in from.”
=========================================================================================
From here it'll go to Roger's discovery that the griefer is in fact a mercenary, and how they trace him back to Sierra's father, who's trying to create a false flag attack. But with everything that was going on in my life this week, I didn't get the time I'd wanted to work on it. But now that it's definitely part of "NPC's," it will get finished.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.