~Mazoga~

Deep in the Edodalar mountains, Mazoga was sitting and staring silently at the wall in front of him. While this wasn’t his favorite home, it was the closest one to the problems he was facing. The stale cavern air wasn’t unpleasant, but he much preferred the soothing dryness of the Arid Wastes. Part of him wanted to lash out at everything around him, but he was having one of his good days, so he only throttled one inconsequential experiment to the brink before stopping. He’d never been much for stress balls. What was the fun of squeezing something that would spring back to its former state? No, he wanted to know that he had squeezed something. He had a firm grasp on reality and the logical part of his mind knew that lashing out would solve nothing, but squeezing the creature’s neck was enjoyable and an excellent way to decompress. Shoving that desire to the back of his head, he resumed his pondering, knowing that it would be more productive. See mom, I can focus!

He’d just seen the Buanaì Death Squad defeated at the hands of his long-time enemy. Two of his finest accomplishments had died before they could even take in what was happening. Sure they would respawn, but it was still embarrassing. The respawning process was not without its downfalls, primarily that they became a little lower level as the process siphoned experience away to fuel the rebirth process, and while they kept their muscle memory, all memories were reset back to the day of its creation. The way Aldi had sat down after knocking a third unconscious as if it was nothing more than a sub par pugilist was infuriating. He gripped Eight with white knuckles and forced himself to place it back upon the pedestal. Aldi had always rubbed him wrong.

“Aldi, oh Aldi. Why are you trying to crawl out of the hole you have kept yourself buried in all these years? The Buanaì would have been successful had you, but stayed out of it.” Mazoga shook his head in frustration. Death squads were elite groups of trained killers, with each having a designated specialist role: rogue dps, healer, tank, and ranged dps. He’d been able to construct three squads before he’d been at risk of discovery by the software developers. The temptation to continue mass producing these squads was strong, but after doing a cost benefit analysis, he decided it wasn’t worth the potential loss of such a powerful tool. It’d get nerfed for sure if he gained too many of them. Instead, he’d adapted. He’d expanded the Order many times over by recruiting and training NPCs. In so doing, he’d embedded the order within the canonical lore of Baherune. This provided a bit of a safety net to the nerfing of his elite squads. While these recruits were indeed deadly adversaries to most, they still were far below the members of his elite triad in skill level. Annoyingly, they didn’t respawn upon death either. While all the members of a squad had advanced training in each of the roles, they could only master one of them. If Aldi had not hindered these masters in the art of death, the boy’s exhaustion would have all but guaranteed their success.

Had his nemesis not turned back to check on his new apprentice, the boy would be dead or wishing he was. Aldwin had single-handedly thwarted more of his plans than all of Mazoga’s other enemies combined. It’d taken a lot of effort to negate the threat the heroic man presented. Though it was more temporary than he realized. When he was younger, Mazoga made a lot of mistakes. He’d been stubborn in his failure and refused to learn lessons quickly. He’d sent creature after creature to kill Aldwin, and the skilled warrior dispatched all of them. Each of his creatures’ death strengthened his enemy by the granting of experience points, an inviolate rule of Baherune that even he couldn’t deny. As time passed, he had recognized that this approach was a waste of time, resources, and effort. Had he overcome his stubbornness earlier he Aldi wouldn’t have progressed at such prodigiously fast pace.

Eventually, though, he had corrected his mistake and had then switched to attacking from the shadows. He figured that if brute force wasn’t doing it, then maybe being a sneaky bastard would work better. He’d even had some minor success with this, but not enough to rid Baherune of his nemesis permanently. Aldwin had adapted and apparently developed some new perception based skills that made sneaking up on him extremely difficult. He’d also figured out how to block Eight from tracking or spying on him, which he was in the process of passing on to his apprentice now. Eight had shown him nothing of any use lately, as every time Mazoga had attempted to take a peek, all he saw was the damn kid crouching as he snuck around the barn over and over again. He knew that every time he peeked, it would inch the boy closer and closer to gaining an anti-scrying skill, but he just couldn’t stop himself. Damn it! He said, reaching out to resume his throttling, before realizing that the creature was nowhere to be found. With a shrug, he went back to his reflections on history. A goblin who didn’t learn from history was doomed to repeat it after all.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Mazoga had switched tactics yet again. This time he’d taken a less direct approach and started baiting Aldwin. It’d taken some time to perfect. It was a lot of groundwork to lie out quest lines that led to inevitable confrontations with powerful experiments of his design. He had to lie out an obscene amount of quests, as Aldi had become more selective in those that he accepted. When the man first entered Baherune, he would snatch up any and every quest that came his way, but as he got stronger, he’d begun to only take the ones that interested him. During the initial phase of this plan, he’d eliminated some NPCs that Aldwin had considered friends. While it had been a blow to Aldwin’s morale, ultimately it had been nothing more than a glancing hit that he’d healed from. Yet it had been a giant step in the right direction. Mazoga had learned that his ability to create and manipulate quests was a more powerful and versatile tool than he’d initially realized.

Mazoga stood up and paced in his characteristically odd and slightly jerky manner. Scuttle sat on his shoulder and enjoyed his master’s rare good mood. Mazoga’s options swirled around in his mind. A fetch quest would be worthless, as money was not an immediate concern for the boy. Who would dive into sewers for rat hides, or wade in a swamp for a rare flowering weed for fun? To his way of thinking, modifying the quest type would be similarly ineffective. So how could he adjust an investigation quest to better suit his needs? Mazoga needed the players to work towards completing this quest so that the Duke and his minions could capture and imprison this player. Once imprisoned, Mazoga could repurpose his soul to fuel more of his experiments.

Mazoga could go all out and order all of his experiments from around the world to drop what they were doing and attack the new player, but he had plans in the works for the future that he didn’t want to delay. Instead, he felt that a subtle touch was best in this instance, so he held off on an Armageddon level mod. He wasn’t sure if those earth side god wannabes were still monitoring this antique virtual world, but if someone was, he needed to fly under the radar. Even god’s lives could be made more difficult than they needed to be.

With a smile, he pulled up the quest associated with the minions that Thorben had killed earlier.

Duke McDingleberry: Help the citizens of Drazalar. Investigate the bandits’ claims of ducal support. Take appropriate action.

So it was a typical quest line meant to guide the player to help fix a problem in a world region. It would hangout in his quest journal until the player happened by and completed it. Aldwin had done this constantly. He prioritized all the exciting killing quests and dungeon delves in the search for rare loot, hoping to build up a formidable arsenal of magical weapons and armor. It was only on rare occasions he needed to clear his quest log, he would bother completing something as basic as an investigation quest. Though Mazoga had once lured him into an ambush onetime by creating pressure to finish. Chances are this new player would ignore it for a while unless he changed that.

As he thought of his options, he stopped pacing and completed his normal exit routine. As he walked out of his sanctuary, he headed to his kitchen and tried hard not to skip. Mazoga knew he should be upset at this most recent setback, but there was something about a potential fresh competition that made his pulse pound. It’d been a long time since somebody else had provided any sense of a challenge to him, so he had immersed himself in his plans and the prep work that they entailed. Now, someone posed a risk to his plans. This made him feel alive in a way that he hadn’t realized was missing from his existence as a god.

Mazoga poured himself a glass of his special wine and broke off a piece of stale sweetbread for Scuttle, who promptly carried it off to his table spot to enjoy. As he returned to his Sanctuary to enjoy his guilty pleasure, he had a sudden surge of inspiration. “How could I have taken this long to think of something this basic?!” Mazoga grasped Eight. Damn it! The boy was still sneaking around the barn. Mazoga pushed that image aside and pulled up the quest from earlier. With his decision made, he adjusted it. After confirming his changes, he activated it. Now that it was live, all he could do was wait. It shouldn’t be over 14 days now.

Duke McDingleberry: Help the citizens of Drazalar. Investigate the bandits’ claims of ducal support by speaking with the Duke in his throne room. Take appropriate action. Time Remaining: 14 days (Reward forfeited if not completed in allotted time.)

Mazoga chuckled as he reread the updated quest for information. Nothing like an arbitrary timeline to both frustrate and motivate.