Wyatt, the crafter, had a booth right where Sam had told us. Colonel Ames didn't have any useful information on the Hoosier Mamas Guild. He said they hadn't crossed his radar, which didn't mean much. There were dozens of small organizations of a few miners putting their heads together in an attempt to stay afloat.
We found Wyatt in his booth, carving some deep purple wood. He looked up as we approached and smiled. "Ah, customers. What can I do for you, Captain Williams, Miss Sage?"
"You know us?" I asked, dropping into a chair on the street side of his booth. He had a brightly colored canvas awning, striped with white and red, over top of his two long folding tables. Behind him was a small but neatly built wooden shack. The table in front of him was covered in wood shavings and various tools. The table to his left had various carved wooden items. Sage picked one up. It looked like a very ugly doll. Probably something that was cultural appropriation of someone's heritage, but to me, it just looked like an ugly fat naked man with oversized lips.
Sage's eyebrows rose. "Interesting. This is a creep booster. It's similar to the ones we earned in phase two, but customized for extra impact against Egyptian mythological origin creep.”
“It's part of an order I have from a group that's in an Egypt-themed raid instance."
“Oh yeah, they’re on Sekhmet right now,” Sage said. “Still have four bosses to go, not a big threat.”
Wyatt lowered his tools and looked uncomfortable. "Uh, right, I've been selling to the aliens even after hearing about what you're doing. Sorry. I've got a contract I'm trying hard to buy out."
"I understand," I said. "Misfits never asked anyone to stop. I just hope you're charging them a fortune and a half."
"Oh, yeah, definitely. All of us got together, the ones who are still selling, and agreed to raise our prices by a factor of three when we got word of what you were doing. We'll make those bastards pay one way or the other."
"Good man," I said. "You do all this out of wood?"
"Sure do. Some of the farm zones have really interesting woods, and my class was, suitably enough, [Wood Carver]. I can make wooden accessories for your gear, wooden upgrades, wooden devices like this to help your outpost work at peak efficiency. I think there's almost nothing I can't make out of wood."
"I wanted to ask you about one of your commissions for Major Waters."
"Oh, him? Yeah, that was about three weeks back. It was real interesting. He brought me the pattern - a lot of people do that - and asked me if I could adapt it to use wood and to be real subtle, something that couldn't be detected. I said, of course I could, but it was going to cost him. I charged him the 3x multiplier that I mostly keep for the aliens because something about that guy just creeped me out. But his money was good, so he got what he wanted."
"Which was?" I prompted.
"20 of these - let me check -" From his inventory, he pulled out a blueprint. It was literally blue with white lines traced on it. "Yeah, it's called an embassy stick."
"And what exactly does it do?"
"It lets someone claim a contested piece of land as a part of their outpost, even if it's not physically connected. You set up enough of these, you can claim a nice little parcel. He said his people were having trouble with farming and needed easy ways to set up safe zones. Put a couple of these down, and they'd be able to enjoy all the same protections that their outpost does. Even be able to put up turrets and creep generators."
Except that was not what he had done. I frowned. "What about an offensive use?" I asked.
Wyatt cocked his head. "I'm not sure I understand.”
“What if you set these up around somebody else's outpost?"
"Well, that wouldn't be contested land, would it?" Wyatt said. "I mean, not unless you then went and captured the nexus and put it into contested mode, but I don't see what these sticks would gain you."
I held up a hand. "No, I'm telling you what he did. He used these sticks around our nexus outpost and somehow captured it without ever generating a system alert. I want to know how he did it and how I can reverse that."
Wyatt frowned. "I don't know very much about how systems and outposts all work."
"Let me see that blueprint," I said. I picked it up without waiting for him to give me permission, took a picture of it and sent it to Veda. This is what they used. Tell me how.
"Oh," Wyatt said, brightening up. "I actually messed up one of them when I was making it and had to redo it, but I've got the spare around here somewhere."
He paused for a moment, then produced it from his inventory. "Be happy to sell it to you if you like, at a discount even."
Sage snatched the wooden stick from his hand and vanished it into her inventory. I only had time to catch a glimpse of it. It was about eight inches tall and an inch across, made of dark red stained wood, carved all over with whorls and loops, something like Celtic knotwork.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
"Hey, you've got to pay for that," Wyatt said.
Sage leaned across the table. "My grandpa is stuck in our own outpost at the mercy of that, that, that porridge-drinking no-good welch Waters. And you helped him. You should be glad I'm not burning down your whole stall."
"Porridge-drinking?” I asked. "You need to hang out with the Mongeese more and learn some proper curses."
"I promised Mama Grace I'd watch my language," Sage said.
I turned to Wyatt. "She's right about one thing. Those little toys of yours, they've put Misfits Guild in a world of hurt. Now, I don't think you did it on purpose, but I do think you owe it to us to help straighten this mess out."
Wyatt turned pale. "I had no idea," he said.
"Anything else you can remember? Anything that Waters might have said or done?"
Wyatt frowned. “I don’t think so. If I think of it, I’ll let you know.”
"Thanks," I said. "If we have anything else to ask, we know where to find you.”
“And if we don't find you here," Sage said brightly, "we know how to track you down and talk to you while you're trying to sleep."
****
By the time I made it back to our side of Threshold, Veda had an answer for me.
Got it. The Embassy Sticks set up a virtual zone of control around your outpost under the name of Gloomwing Damnation That let them set the rules for how to treat non-guild members. By default, it just kicks them out of a claimed area after they've been given a warning, like what we had set up.
Ok, I follow that so far, I replied. I don’t know how they stole our outpost, but they did. Then what? Waters would have known from his Proxima masters about the ruleset change. Our side had pretended to protest over it, even though it was what we wanted, and it had taken weeks to work through the appeals system. Plenty of time for Waters to make his plan, whatever that was.
Veda continued. It looks like Waters invoked a different rule set, one that says you can stay, but all your abilities get taken away. Even the system ones, like chatting, which I think is an exploit. I haven't quite figured out how he's able to get away with that one. That's supposed to be immune from miners' interference, but if anyone could find a way around that restriction, it would be Proxima.
So they claimed your whole outpost as theirs, and their people are the only ones who can use any abilities. They were ready when it happened, stormed in with weapons and abilities, herded everyone into the church, and are keeping them locked down.
I was getting mad again just thinking about it, but not mad enough to overlook the obvious problem here.
But how could they have claimed our outpost if it was never disputed? They didn't take our Nexus. I checked our guild information. It still said we owned our Nexus.
That's right. The Nexus is yours, Veda said. They're using an exploit. If you were standing directly on the Nexus itself, you'd still be in Misfits' territory. But even a couple of inches away, you're in Gloomwing Damnation territory, and their rules apply.
As for how they managed... I actually have to admire them for this. Whoever Proxima had designing this really knew their stuff. So when the rule set changed over to allow outposts to be attacked, there was a very slight delay as things came back up. Certain tasks had a higher priority than others and queued up first. These embassy sticks that Waters built, they have a really, really high priority. They were almost the first thing to come back up when the rule swap came into existence. Certainly before your own outpost's rules came back online.
That means they were able to start the claiming process for the area around your Nexus without alerting anyone or tipping your Nexus over into contested mode.
My head swam. I wasn't quite sure the explanation made sense to me.
That seems like a huge loophole, I said. How does anyone ever attack inside someone else’s outpost?
They enabled Explicit Attack Mode, Veda relayed. Usually the outposts maintain Phase Two mode - anyone who attacks is automatically flagged as hostile. They can’t be locked down because, like you said, that would be cheating. Instead they’ve made it so anyone not part of their guild has to explicitly flag themselves as attackers. It’s a mode set up so you can have strangers walk around your base, like if you’re a merchant guild who wants to let warriors in for some shopping. But in this case, flagging as an attacker is considered an action by the System. Since your friends are all locked down, they can’t flag. They’re just stuck.
Great, so I just need to round up a couple hundred of us and go hit them hard. I reconsidered. Grandpa and the other hostages needed to be freed. Maybe that’s plan B. All right, let's assume you are correct. What does that actually mean? How do we get Grandpa and the others out of there?
We're going to need to sequence things carefully. It would help if I could get another rule set change, but that's not going to happen. I'll get back to you.
Don't take too long, I said. She didn't respond. So instead, I fumed at Sage about the whole situation. We returned to Mama Grace's kitchen. Rosa popped out.
"How's it going, Shad? Sage? You look unhappy, but I think Shad always looks kind of grumpy. I don't know what my sister sees in him," she said to Sage.
Sage giggled. "Juana says she thinks he's dependable," she said in a tell-tale kind of voice.
Rosa rolled her eyes, and I pretended to ignore the whole situation.
"Can you tell Juana that we're working on a plan, and I'll be coming for them soon?"
"I'll pass it along," Rosa promised. “But you’ve already said that. You’re just brooding, Shad. Can’t you do it somewhere else?”
“Where?" I asked. "We haven't got an outpost. The kobold tunnels are full of our displaced miners. This is our home away from home, and you want to kick us out?"
"Yes, 'cause it's disturbing to have you here and not Mama," Rosa said.
I noted that she wasn't asking us for any information about what it was we had learned or were planning to do. If she was the mole, wouldn't she have taken any opportunity she could to seek out more information?
"Oh, Juana says that she's glad you're trying hard and has faith in you, but to please hurry up because there's not enough room for all of them to lie down, and so they're having to take it in shifts to nap, and Waters' people keep setting off loud alarms every 20 minutes or so, so they can't actually sleep."
"Right, but it's been 12 hours," I said, checking the clock. "We're not exactly talking Geneva war crimes here yet."
"Doesn't sound very pleasant to me," Sage retorted. "I don't think you have nearly enough sympathy for our friends’ plight, Shad."
I was ready to rip my hair out. "Look, I'm desperate to do something, anything, and I'm having to restrain myself from charging in there and shooting the place full of holes before getting myself killed over and over and over again. I gotta get out of here for a while.”
“What are you planning?” Sage asked suspiciously. “Should I come with you?”
“No, let me do this. There’s one person I haven’t talked to, and I think I should. Stay here and take a break. I promise I won’t get myself killed while I’m gone.”