Austin Grossman - You

Staff of the Sorcerous Gentleman: All spells cast by the wielder have quadruple effect and duration. Intelligence increases. Staff cannot be discarded. After 3–4 hours, wielder will involuntarily begin moving toward the nearest body of salt water and immerse him- or herself, there to die unless sustained by artificial means. “Do you know extended underwater breathing? How fast can you teach it?”

Arch-lich: mightiest of the undead; the animate corpses of mortals too proactive to die. Being a sixteenth-level spell caster with genius intelligence was merely the price of entry. You’d need a 120,000-gp soul repository, a dream quest to the Negative Material Plane, the sacrifice of a true innocent, and the iron will to die bodily but just keep on trucking. Whenever you saw an arch-lich walking around, you saw the remains of somebody who didn’t mind having a skull for a head, if that was what it took. You may as well use its name.

Daemon Prince. Did this mean the Devil? This is where my fantasy theology got muddled. Who were these guys, again? Did they live in hell? If so, why was there a hell in Endoria, if the Christian God wasn’t there?

I had to be one of only a few English majors to find Paradise Lost of practical, on-the-job utility. But how did “the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” translate into to-hit and damage values?

The black sword came back. This time it was in a test level I built in the old game to look at all the different terrain types—just a big room divided into strips of grass, marble, ice, dirt, and cobblestone. I looked away and looked back, and there was a goblin with an outsize black sword in its hand. It was a standard broadsword, but it was a flat black and had markings on it.

It was charging straight toward me and I watched it come. It had spawned from nothing. Just before it closed to combat distance, I took my hands off the keyboard and mouse, as if the sword held a mysterious charge that might have come up through my own character and into me. My stats cratered at its touch and I watched from the remains of my default first-level fighter as it collapsed in a heap. The sword vanished. I checked; invulnerability was set to ON.

But I knew, now, what it made me think of.

“Hey, Matt, what happens in the Second Age?”

Matt was in the kitchen, planted before the snack machine with the solemnity of a pagan idol.

I no longer felt bad about interrogating Matt about the Black Arts canon. I needed to know these things if I was going to be in charge of the story, and if Matt was shocked at my complete ignorance of a large section of my job he never showed it. In fact, I gradually realized that his fundamental good nature was one of those intangibles that made it possible for the office to function. That and I was pretty sure these conversations were the best part of his day.

“The Second Age? Well, of course, there are conflicting accounts.” He paused, maintaining a sleepy professorial air as he considered the uppermost tier of treats, the chips and trail mix.

“But there’ve been actual games set there, right?”

“Well, supposedly RoGII: War in the Realms, as you know. But it’s precanon, right? More what I’d call a narrative possibility space bounded by the strategic parameters of the game.” He broke off, shyly. He’d thought about these things a lot.

“Do we have a copy?” I asked hopefully.

He shook his head. “Probably not. I used to play it on the C64 way back, but I don’t think it ever got ported. I think it was a high school thing, in fact. Darren had a copy, but he probably just took it with him.”

“Thanks.”

The sun outside was just touching the line of trees at the back of the parking lot, so I went back to my desk and spent a little while puzzling through sample code for the scripting language I was going to be using. It was the moment, around six thirty, when the music was turned up, when anyone intent on keeping to a regular work schedule had already left the building, and anyone else still there was slacking and playing games, or else crunching on a serious deadline, or simply keeping a nontraditional schedule. People arrived as late as one in the afternoon and stayed at work until midnight or one.

By midnight the population of Black Arts had dwindled to a couple of programmers typing in the semidark Realms pit, headphones on, and a QA guy snoring in an oversize beanbag chair. No one was watching as I stepped into Darren’s office and closed the door behind me. I pictured Adric at the unholy forge, hammering and binding the secrets of the world into the glowing black broadsword engraved in the runes of a language so obscene that the Powers themselves recoiled to hear it spoken.

It looked like no one had cleaned up the office since he left. There wasn’t much reason to: it was furnished with just a standard gray Black Arts office desk facing the door, plus a whiteboard on the wall and a low metal bookshelf. When he walked out, he had taken his desktop computer. His power supply, monitor, keyboard, and mouse were all still there, as well as posters of Duke Nukem, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Johnny Lightning, plus a beach-ball-size inflatable icosahedron. He hadn’t even taken any of his game design awards. A pile of three-ring binders had been emptied and dumped on the floor, along with what proved to be a sheath for a katana. There were a few more binders on the low bookshelf, an employee manual, and a couple of manila folders. There was no desk chair. Probably it had been a nice one, and an alert coworker had made off with it.

Darren had cofounded the company, and his designs were, to use the term, legendary. What did he think about at his desk? Both his desk drawers were locked—maybe he hadn’t emptied them. The venetian blinds looking out on the office were closed. There was no reason not to poke around. Black Arts’ Ikea-grade office furniture locks weren’t exactly bank vaults. I looked around for a paper clip. There were plenty.

After a few minutes I decided that office furniture locks are pretty underrated as a first-line defense. I looked around for anything else clever to jab into the metal lock. Maybe that was why Darren took his sword with him. I was starting to think about how it would look if somebody came in. I looked at the shoddy little desk again. Real game designers knew how to pick locks, I was sure.

I sat down where the office chair used to be. The desk was just too cheap an object to stand between me and whatever was locked inside. It was a crappy grade of chipboard, the kind most movers won’t even consent to put on a truck, even if you ask nicely. There was just about a finger’s width of space between the face of the desk drawer and the face of the desk itself. I made a mental assessment of how desperate I thought I might actually be, then I scooted in, put a foot against one of the desk’s feet, got a two-handed grip on the front of the drawer, and pulled.

It creaked a little, then ripped out by half an inch. I could see it was just stuck together with metal pins. I pulled it farther and it crackled and bent outward. I shifted grips, pulled it out farther, and looked in. It was empty inside. I should have started with the upper drawer, I realized. I got a grip on the edge and pulled. Inside were foam rubber nunchakus, knitting needles, an unopened packet of yarn, and an old manila envelope labeled TRS-80. It held a lot of 5.25-inch floppy disks, mismatched Maxells and 3Ms, unevenly hand-labeled in ballpoint. They comprised a library of old Apple II and TRS-80 games, some I recognized and some I didn’t, but the set of eight was all jammed into the same paper sleeve together. A few had been notched on the left side by a hole punch. The top disk on the stack had been used and reused. The label read WORDSTAR (crossed out), then M.U.L.E. (crossed out), then ROG2 DISK 4. And underneath, a notation. LANESBOROUGH, AUGUST 83.