Bastions Read online

  "All games on the Celenion Framework are able to connect with each other now," said Sage. "I suspect that one of the guilds in Mage World was working on a way to travel to another game. Perhaps they knew which game they were linking with, or maybe it was random. Either they were working on such a method, and Golem seized it from them, or Golem somehow managed to create a path on its own. But if mages are coming through as well, then it sounds as though leaving Mage World has become more appealing than staying. Which means that Golem has severely gotten out of control, to a catastrophic degree."

  "This thing could try and take over Sigil Online?" Thrash asked. "I'm sure we have more capability of stopping it with all the powers associated with our game than what Mage World had to offer."

  Sage shook his head. "I'm sure Golem will absorb any powers that it gets its hands on. For instance," he gestured to Laura, "if it were to kill and absorb Laura, it would steal her duplication ability."

  Riley's eyes widened. "That Angler Jelly thing that almost ate me. Gella said that it was one of their forerunner monsters that would go around and collect up resources. Was…I a resource? I thought it was just going to kill me to get me out of the way, or gain some basic resources for eating me. You're saying it would've gotten my power to steal other powers?"

  Sage nodded. "Right now, Golem would have to absorb a player in order to take its power. It would have to kill them. From what I remember, Golem had a number of…what did we classify them as? Digesters? I think."

  "I hate the sound of this thing," Laura murmured.

  "But," Sage continued, "if it kills you specifically," he said, pointing to Riley, "it would have the power to gain anyone's power by merely touching them."

  Riley's wide eyes slowly flitted around the room before staring off in thought.

  "If Golem is truly invading our game, then how do we stop it?" asked Laura, looking to Sage.

  Sage shook his head. "There are two viable modes of inter-game travel that I know of. As far as what Mage World Online has the capability of. But things might've changed since I was a player there. One of the methods would involve a gateway with a portal. This portal would fire you off to your destination, but once you were there, you wouldn’t have a way back. This took a lot of power per traveler. The other option is to create a gateway there and a gateway here. For that to work, the first travelling mode is required to send a force of troops and workers to collect an enormous amount of resources, to then construct a gateway on this side as well, for the two to link up. This two-way gateway would require an enormous amount of energy to stay open, or to be active. At least, that's what comes to mind."

  "So how long has this Golem thing been here?" asked Thrash.

  "Somewhere in the last three weeks, maybe only in the last week, possibly. Or maybe just a couple days," said Sage. "They finalized the Celenion Framework integration three weeks ago. But that doesn't mean that another entity could reach our game. I'm guessing the developers, or the world AI, would handle that. So I imagine that we weren't on par with Mage World until a week ago, when Bastions came out. I suspect it could've started arriving at any point after that."

  "How long do you think it would need to acquire all the resources for a gate?" asked Riley.

  "I don't know," said Sage. "I can only imagine that it has an enormous hold on Mage World. It would be more powerful than all the guilds combined. You see, guilds take resource-heavy and easily defendable territory, wherever they can find resources to bunker-down and protect. Golem doesn't work that way. It consumes all material in sight. As you were describing it earlier, it does use a sort of oil-like gel to move about and utilize as both roots and a sort of absorption and digestion mechanic of all life around it. This stuff will consume plants and animals and any lesser monsters it comes in contact with. It will consume exposed minerals and constantly expand. It will build fortifications and warriors and structures in places that it needs more time to extract resources. But it's always producing new warriors and utility units to push ever onward in a wave of death. You can attack one of its bases. You can scour it from the ground. You can burn it away, you can freeze it, you can dissolve it with acid…but you're only delaying a mere fraction of its capability. You'd barely be slowing it down, and you would surely take losses in the process." Sage hummed to himself. "It could be continually dropping units into our world, even now. We need to be hunting them down."

  "How do we find them, if they're invisible like Riley said?" asked Laura.

  "It only partially revealed itself when it was hunting me," said Riley. "But my stealth vision with the goggles isn't very high. There's others in the alliance who have higher stealth vision, I'm sure."

  "There's someone in our guild with better stealth vision," Laura said with a smirk.

  "Ah, right. Glint," said Riley. "She'd be able to see them for sure. If she can't, then I don't know who could, other than the woman I met earlier, Gella." Riley's brows lifted. "Oh, that's right. I sent Gella toward Crimson City to see if she could meet up with any of her friends. She said that they all came through one of the portals that Golem had made. So it has to be using that portal to launch troops here. But apparently she and her friends got through. Maybe they'd be willing to help us out. It's in their interest to do so."

  "Hmm, Gella," Sage murmured. "The name isn't familiar to me. I'm not sure that we could trust them. For all we know, she and her comrades could be part of the plot that released Golem from its cage. Was her armor any particular colors?"

  Riley thought for a moment. "I remember her hair had a red and blue streak through it, if that matters."

  "Red and blue? Hmm…maybe…what was their name…" Sage murmured some more. "Sky Fires. That's it. They were one of the guilds that…hmm, they might have been in the top ten when I was around last, but they weren't acquiring much in the way of territory. They might have fallen out of power since I last played."

  "Well, if the Sky Fires can help us, we should at least speak with them," said Laura. "We should try and find out where she went and if she found her guild mates."

  "Sounds like we have the day's activity worked out already," said Thrash. "We form a party with a stealth-seer and go on the hunt. Did the Golem creature give you much experience?"

  Riley thought for a moment. "Yeah, about as much as any monster of its strength. Maybe a little more."

  "Then that settles it!" Thrash held his fist up. "We hunt these monsters and prevent them from gaining a foothold in Sigil!"

  "How do we know where they're going to be…'acquiring materials?'" Laura asked.

  "My best guess would be the wild areas," said Sage. "Anywhere outside the cities. It's unlikely that they would appear in any of the alternate dimensions that make up Sigil. Then again, I don't know for sure. But that would be my guess."

  "Well, the wilds are pretty vast, made up of numerous biomes," said Laura. "Riley was in the desert earlier. There are forests…caves…tundra…a few seas. There's quite a lot of ground to cover. We can't take this Golem thing on by ourselves. We need to alert the other guilds in the game. Everyone needs to know about these things."

  "You're right," said Sage. "If we don't unite, even in a loose fashion, with the other guilds of Sigil, this game will slowly fall, just as Mage World apparently has."

  "So let's make sure that doesn't happen," said Riley. "I'm going to post on the forums when I log off. If other people are doing so as well, we'll be able to alert the other guilds."

  "I'll try and get messages out to the guilds near us," said Sage. "The best thing we can do is just spread the word to anyone we can. The more people that know, the better. Also, I'll need to push our resources into greater surveillance and stealth detection, so that we can monitor the nearby regions for Golem incursions. It's not too late for us to stop this threat."

  Riley then spoke up. "Also, when I killed one of the anglers, it dropped all the loot it was trying to digest. So you might luck out and get some items that way. It's definitely worth it to try and
kill these things. It's not like we aren't getting anything out of it."

  "That's all the reason I need," said Thrash as he held his fist up again. "I look forward to testing the mettle of these creatures."

  "I'm sure you'll get your chance," said Sage. "If it's as bad as I suspect, then you're going to have more than enough, very soon."

  "I'm going to head to our HQ and post on our board," said Laura. "Then I'll head back and try to form up with whoever is going out to hunt these things."

  "Well, I'm heading off," said Riley. "I need to get something to eat and take some time to post online. So I'll be back and join up with anyone who's here then."

  "See you later," said Laura.

  "See ya." Riley nodded, before turning and heading off toward one of the available side-rooms to log out in. Luckily, even though it was a hellion bastion, the rooms could still be used by paragons since it was alliance-owned. The bed in the room was little more than a gelatinous red bubble. It was squishy, but Riley wouldn't need to be on it for long. He'd get a nice rested buff from using it while he was logged off, which was all he cared about. Otherwise, he would've headed back to the Bunker Brawlers’ HQ.

  He laid down and gestured to log out of the game. He closed his eyes and sighed. What a day. He figured the week was going to be pretty tiring as well. The first month of a new expansion usually tended to be.

  Chapter 15: SHO Cafe

  Riley's head was planted on his arms. A glass of water sat beside him on the table in the cafe. He'd been there for about ten minutes. His appearance was different than it was in-game, since he hadn't tried to mirror his physique in its entirety. He was shorter, scrawnier. His hair was longer and scraggly, only because he didn't visit the barber very often. He wore a simple black t-shirt and a pair of jeans.

  This was the real world, which always felt less familiar to him than a virtual one. Even a virtual one he'd only spent a few years in. Even if the virtual world was more stressful, it somehow felt right, as if he belonged there.

  A hand came to his shoulder and gently shook him. He turned his head and looked up with blurry vision to see Aaron standing there with a smirk on his face. The other young man was roughly the same age as himself, but had more androgynous features and had a more pale complexion overall. He was wearing his usual black hoodie and a pair of jeans. "Hey Aaron," Riley murmured as he slowly sat up and leaned back in his booth seat. He rolled his shoulders and sighed. "What's up?" he asked out of habit.

  "I feel like you have more to tell than I do," said Aaron as he sat across from Riley in the two-person booth. "You look like you're not sleeping enough."

  "Yeah, yeah," Riley murmured as he rubbed his eyes some more and lowered his hands. He grabbed the water and took a gulp before looking over to Aaron with a few blinks, trying to clear his vision after having his face on his arm. "Anything on those wallets yet?" he asked.

  "Not really. I ran a query on them to try and find out if any data was on them. The query came back inconclusive. So I didn't learn anything there. I just have to try and decrypt them. The machine is running right now. Just have to let it do its thing. Can't rush it. Well, I guess you could rush it if you wanted to buy me a few more decrypters."

  "Nope, I can wait." Riley smirked. "I just hope we get something out of them."

  Aaron shrugged. "It'd be nice to make something from nothing, but I'm not holding out any hope. I'm just doing it to appease you, really."

  "You have no sense of adventure," Riley accused.

  "That's fine with me," Aaron sighed. "I prefer to sit back and relax in front of a terminal. Being the Weevil is cool and all. Smashing enemies is fun, but it can get pretty tiring. The only reason I was so adamant about it was to make ends meet. But now that things are better, I'd much prefer to stick to the management and crafting side of the game."

  "I know, I know." Riley waved his hand dismissively.

  "Your turn. What's up?"

  "Well, first," Riley began, as if he had a whole slew of things he wanted to say. "I told Sage, Laura and Thrash about Golem."

  "Golem?" Aaron asked.

  "It's the black-scaled oily things I was telling you about."

  "Oh, right, right. Golem. Got it. Continue."

  "So, I told them about it, and Sage seemed to know all about it. Apparently his guild created it in Mage World Online. So, he's kind of one of the people who is the cause of the whole thing. Which is ironic, but it's also helpful to us, because we know a bit about how it works. So, long story somewhat shorter, I told him that I'd post about it on the Sigil forums. Which I did. I posted on a few forums. And you know what happened?"

  "I haven't any clue," said Aaron.

  "They didn't believe me!"

  Aaron's brow furrowed. "Who?"

  "Everyone!" Riley exclaimed. "I posted about what I saw and the monster and that it was called Golem and that it was dangerous and everything I knew, and parts about what Sage had told me, without naming him specifically. I told them that Golem was this thing from Mage World Online."

  "And?" Aaron asked.

  "Aaaand, I got a ton of downvotes on the post. Along with a number of people who claimed I was lying, just trying to start some conspiracy theory, or trying to get famous or get upvotes on the post for the story. Some of them claimed that the Mage World situation wasn't that bad, and that Golem did exist there, but that it was managed and there hadn't been any word about it trying to go to other games. So my post pretty much died after an hour of being live."

  "That's rough," said Aaron. "You want me to find it and post that I saw something too, to help you out?"

  Riley shrugged. "I doubt it'd do anything," he grumbled.

  "Not much you can do about it, I suppose. Everyone already assumes that people are trying to sell an angle. That's probably what happened."

  "Yeah, I guess." Riley reached up and ruffled his fingers through his hair. "So yeah, that's what happened with that. When I got online for the second time, I joined up with some people from the alliance and went out with them along with some of our minions. There were only five of us, but that should've been more than enough. We had two other groups out in different directions, already searching, but apparently, one of the scorpions I had with me had really good stealth-vision, better than the one I was using earlier today. So anyway, we searched for a few hours, killed a bunch of random monsters, got some meager materials. Nothing fancy. But we didn't see a single sign of Golem. Literally nothing. The other two groups reported the same thing when they came back. So our big push to help manage Golem expanding into our world was a bust. We were hoping to find…something, anything. But nope. Didn't happen. Huge waste."

  "Are you all going to stop searching then?" Aaron asked.

  "I don't think so, or at least, I hope not," said Riley. "We didn't make any progress on pushing Golem back."

  "But if you didn't find anything, maybe it's not that big of a deal? If it wasn't easily noticeable, then maybe it's not spread out yet?"

  "I don't know if we should be thinking of it that way," said Riley. "I think it's probably hiding. Like I said, it was stealthed when I encountered that one creature."

  "But that was just one creature," said Aaron. "Not that I'm trying to discredit the threat, but you've seen just one single monster from this Golem thing. What if there aren't that many around? And who knows, maybe that Mage World person you met is actually hunting the creatures down already with her allies."

  "Maybe," Riley murmured. "But I wouldn't exactly count on that being the case. We have to keep on our toes, or this thing could possibly take over all of Sigil Online. It really sounds like a terrible creature. Sure, there hasn't been a huge amount of proof yet, but this creature has probably figured out how to be stealthy. It knows what it's doing and is apparently good at it."

  "Did you guys check underground?"

  "We were only on the surface. But we were using scanners to detect any movement and lifesigns in the vicinity around us. So we were definitely checking."


  "Well, good luck," Aaron sighed as he leaned back in his seat. He picked up a menu and started to peruse it. "Sounds like you're hunting a ghost that doesn't want to be found."

  "Yeah, something like that, I suppose," Riley murmured. "But there are ways to lure it out, I think." He lowered his gaze, staring at the table in thought. "It came after me when I was alone. I can't help but feel as though these things are very careful. It was hunting my NPCs and then me. And if it truly is some sort of vast and intelligent hive-mind, then what if…" Riley's eyes widened as his gaze rose. "The creature I fought wasn't a ground-based entity. It was a floating jellyfish. It probably doesn't come near ground unless it has prey in sight. And why would it try and do anything in a confined space in a tunnel? It wouldn't be able to escape, like it tried to do with me. I think…I think these things are hiding in the sky, probably outside the range of our detection mechanisms. I don't know how well they can see, but they could be looming up in the atmosphere, just waiting for easy prey."

  "That sounds as likely as anything," said Aaron. "Maybe you should work with that. Might want to tell the others."

  "Yeah," Riley murmured, still staring off. He reached over for his glass of water and took a drink. "I should head back in."

  Aaron's brows lifted. "Wait, right this second? You're not even going to eat first?"

  Riley shook his head. "There's still plenty of time in the night. I'm going to head back and get some ramen and see if I can't convince them to check the skies."

  "Uh, alright. Don't go staying on all night. You were up early, same as me. But yeah, I'll catch you tomorrow then."

  "Yeah, sorry," Riley said as he slid out of the booth. "I just think we need to act on this quickly. Sorry to run off."

  "It's alright, do what you need to do," Aaron said with a smile.

  Riley smiled and nodded. "Catch you later."

  Chapter 16: Checking In