PART TWENTY-NINE

MPD: 82

Top Trap: Cannonball

BVLeaks: 3345 followers

The story gets hard to write now because I was spinning plates like a mow foe. Once, I tried to explain this part in a bar and it was one of those conversations where I kept having to backtrack and say things like 'oh yeah I forgot to say that I'd previously broken into the guild hall and secreted a hamper of whisky there'. I'll do my best to stick to some semblance of organisation.

How about I remind you which plates I was spinning?

In-Game

Growing Austeralia. New games for the day, new traps for the night. Marketing. Preparing the dungeon/park for a huge influx of players (if my social media and video scams went as hoped).

Becoming a property magnate. My inn was coming along nicely but I had three other plots of land sitting around doing nothing.

Maximizing my in-game side hustle income. Luga had been turning logs into arrows and arrows into cash, and those amounts were increasing. He was one of the only NPCs who seemed unperturbed by the end of the world. He just kept grinding. Every time he saw me he nagged me to get feathers for the arrows.

Watching out for Circe Polka Jr. I had a feeling he'd be back and up to no good.

IRL

Keep leaking information and growing the BVLeaks accounts. So that I could later use my followers to promote the Billy-Bob Bain video channel. So that I could actually start making some real-life cash from all this work! I had 6 months of VIP membership so there was a deadline of sorts.

Keeping in touch with the Swords. They'd gone back to doing quests and playing the game normally - they wanted to get everyone back to level 20 as fast as possible because according to BVLeaks (386 via me) the new content and improved game mechanics would be released somehow and the game would transition to version 1.0. The Swords wanted to be among the first to tackle all the new quests and visit the new locations. They asked me to tell them when I added something 'unmissable' to the dungeon. Valentine offered to drop everything and help in the park whenever I wanted.

You Hear the Door Slam

There were probably more plates but I'm bored of trying to remember them all. I want to tell you about a few important things that happened.

First, there was the day I told 386 it was time for our biggest expansion since we'd added the attribute games.

"It's time for THRILL RIDES," I announced.

"Great," said 386, with the enthusiasm of a woman in a restaurant who's just heard her blind date's only hobby is crypto.

"You're not paying attention," I said.

"It's all kicking off in the entrance arcade. There's a man showing a woman how to play Spider Smash. He's standing very close to her and is very hands-on with his teaching. But she, get this, she is NOT his wife!"

"Scandal," I said. "When did you start getting interested in the minutiae of human life?"

"I've always been interested in humans. I'm a people person. Famously so."

"Sure. But focus here, please. This is big." I spent the next few minutes trying to explain what I wanted.

"Ahem," said 386, and it was clear I had his full attention now. "Just to clarify... the goal is to splatter people on the opposite wall?"

"No, of course not." I thought about thrill rides in general and realised 386 would ask the same question for most of them. "Fully non-lethal."

386 sighed. "But what's the point then? The rotation will probably be quite expensive in terms of mana."

"Will it? Hmm. Let's build it and you can crunch the numbers to see if it's profitable. As for the point, where I come from, humans love this stuff. It's scary but you know you're safe, and it gives you a feeling you can't normally get."

"What's the feeling?"

"Like you're flying, sort of. Like you're defying gravity? I'll pick up your core and spin you around and you'll see what I mean."

"No, I won't. I don't experience physics like you do. My core is mostly allegorical."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"But I think I can create what you want. Explain about the cage again." I did. "And what should this... ride... be called?"

"How about Zero Gravity?"

"I know you're joking. The machine will create the opposite effect of zero gravity. Look." 386 flashed a bunch of circles, arrows, and equations onto the wall - I glanced at them and knew that if I argued with him my brain would melt and dribble out of my ears.

"I'll leave the physics to the physicians." That was a joke to wind him up. Don't email me. "It's just a name. Humans like these rides to have extreme names that connote danger and excitement. But fine. I dub this room: The Centrifuge!"

Taking Credit

I had lots of other thrill rides to tell him about, but we also had to get to work making videos. 386 didn't understand why I wanted the videos I wanted, but he had a lot of thoughts about how to make them. There was a lot of bickering about who got to be called the director. He settled for a co-producer credit, because he was too new to the movie industry to know how little that actually meant.

He was great at choosing appropriate bits of scenery from the vast catalog available to us. When I complained that he hadn't told me he had access to ThetanSoft's entire library of assets, he did his shruggy voice and said, "You didn't ask."

Anyway, it turned out to be a lot of hassle getting things set up. What I wanted to achieve was fairly monumental in scope and we had to shut down most of the dungeon to free up enough mana to make it possible.

Make what possible, I hear you ask. Basically, 386 carved out a huge room and populated it with snow, a frozen stream, yetis, that kind of thing. (You might be thinking 'why not have a yeti as a dungeon defender?' Good question. We could use yetis - or anything a TS artist had left in the library - in these videos, but it was like 386 had created a marionette. He could make it walk and roar but it had zero actual fighting power. It was like a hologram, which meant it was a waste of mana in normal circumstances. But I knew 386 could do it because we'd done it for the decoy dungeon core in the night-time layout.)

But while the scene was all very spectacular it still didn't quite hit the spot. I'd punch a yeti and there'd be a delay before 386 made it react. And it was time-consuming as hello. It took one thirty-minute sesh to set up the scene, then the next day we filmed for another 30 minutes and got 25 seconds of footage. I needed way more than that! And while we were messing about in our - admittedly awesome - movie studio, the dungeon was closed and wasn't earning mana.

386 came through with the solution. I would act out my part and then he'd deepfake the rest of the scene around me. No need to create a set. No need to choreograph a fight scene. I could just blab my lines and let him do all the work. I should have thought of it myself - remember when I ran to save the little girls from the scorpions?

The workflow went like this - I'd go to the dungeon on Monday and make my way into a secret room covered in green cloth. 386 made me change into green armor with dots on, which I *think* was him trolling me, but I was willing to humiliate myself for my art. Absolutely I was. Then overnight he'd use his processing power to fill in the rest of the scene, edit it, and on Tuesday I'd log in and spend five minutes recording the finished product as 386 beamed it onto the wall in front of me. It looked PERFECT. Like I was really having those adventures. We could change the angles at will, too. Then when I logged out, I'd upload the footage to my BetterVerse channel, along with YouTube, with a stupendously poor title. I had to be careful not to get too big a following too quickly...

Taking Credit

A week after the end of the world, I had two five minute videos to launch my channel with and my inn was nearing completion. There were other human-owned inns in the world, but they were rare and the owners didn't tend to write much about them on the forums. I asked 386 what to expect when the building was finished. He told me I'd be able to pick a manager from a selection and that person would run the inn for me. Easy enough! But he warned me that the engine was likely to delay the opening until it could use its upgraded version 1.0 interface. That was fascinating and we had a long chat about the mechanics of that and what it meant about the wider state of the BetterVerse. It was all fodder for BVLeaks which I won't bore you with here.

Before time ran out, I brought up a topic that would have been super awkward with anyone else.

"386, dog, how much money do you owe me?"

"Oh, good question. Let me see. Calculating. Do I have your permission to round to the nearest bronze coin? I know you aren't good with fractions."

"I'm great with fractions. As long as it isn't sevenths. Or ninths. Yes. Hit me."

"I owe you 413 bronze."

"Hmm." That was quite a strange number. It was too low to be useful (unless I wanted to buy 4 logs), but then again we'd only just started this project. But it was also a little bit higher than I would have expected. "And how much have you got in my bank account?"

"1200 bronze."

That was very interesting. I was making much more from selling arrows than from Austeralia! But the turning raw materials into finished products game was too risky to scale up. "Well, cash me out and I'll see if I can buy a Cape of Charisma or whatever."

"Oh," he said.

"What?"

"I don't have that many coins."

There was something of a pregnant pause. One of those soap opera pregnancies where you don't know who the father is. "Umm... what does our contract say about you paying me?" On paper, it sounds like an aggressive question but I genuinely couldn't remember.

"I have to pay you in treasure, items, and other goodly things. I can pay you the equivalent in arrows. Or that flat-pack furniture you keep telling me about. But you told me to use my coins in the gambling machines. Remember? I was to exchange coins for mana."

"Yes, I said that. So... we need to rethink this. Hang on a minute." I squeezed my lips between my finger and thumb. The main thing was to get rich in real life. But I could imagine a time when I'd need some cash of my own, in-game.

"We could charge an entrance fee."

"That would put some people off coming. The main thing is still to get customers and build your mana. No, we keep almost everything free and try to extract money from people as subtly as poss. Right. Change the math on the casino so that you slowly build up a coin reserve. When you've got enough to pay me out you can be more generous with the gamblers. If people notice the games are being stingy, increase the payouts again. I can wait for my share. The priority is to have enough income to hire someone."

"Hire someone?"

"A park manager. Someone with hospitality skills." An idea occurred to me. "Hey! You've been prying into everyone's private lives and reading their character sheets. Has anyone been in who has experience working in hotels or anything like that?"

"It's funny you should mention that..." said 386.