Today's Earth date: March 12, 1992

I don't know if I'm delirious from the humidity or what, but Horcus and Wilmond are making sense. We're not exactly the X-Men, but we are a group of superpowered heroes tasked with saving the world.

Rathain pointed out that he's still hesitant to believe fantastic stories of magic and gods and powers even if he's living it. It's like his Earth brain can't completely accept our lives as being real, even though we're right here sweating our balls off on it.

But me, yeah, I see the parallels. Horcus has already used video game logic a whole bunch to get us ahead. The more we follow his lead on that kind of thing, the easier our lives are. STDs? Assassins? Those things popped up as soon as we abandoned the quest. As soon as we got serious about our jobs again? Smooth sailing.

What happens when we beat the game?

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

In addition to a folder of notes and research from Sheeri, Wayne got one other piece of mail before the Zeroes departed for the Earth Temple: the Page of Power Kryss tried to use to buy information from Wayne. She included a small note thanking him for his help and that she hoped there were no hard feelings.

One whole side was coated in black ink, making it completely unreadable, but the side he cared about was in good condition.

Wayne read one title on the page over and over: Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!

The catalog described it by saying…

The world's finest typing instructor tailors the perfect typing course to your individual needs and checks your progress every step of the way. Fun, fast and interesting! "Resume-Writer" included.

Why did a piece of educational software generate such a deep, nostalgic reaction? He was in middle school by the time his school district incorporated any sort of typing class into the curriculum, and looking back on it, the typing teacher had the easiest class in the district. Every day she said the same thing: "Turn on Mavis Beacon."

And the dorky mini-games did the rest of the teaching for her.

Maybe that was part of it? He was not only a kid, but he also had a surprising amount of autonomy in typing class. If he finished early, he could play Oregon Trail or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, and Wayne always finished early.

He didn't like to brag. Well, yes, he did. He could hit 150 words-per-minute on a good day and imagined that's what the point guard on the basketball team felt like during a winning game. Smooth. Cool. In total control of the chaos.

Wayne needed that mindset now because the chaos of the Forest of 10,000 Cuts wore on him. The party used the train to depart from Mudsville. From the moment they stepped out of the station gate, the rain relentlessly dumped from the sky, a non-stop downpour that seemed otherworldly. When Wayne saw rainstorms on Earth–at least, what he saw in his little corner of it–a storm could only sustain a few minutes of intense precipitation. It might drizzle for days on end, but the heaviest, most violent moments were brief.

Not in the Cuts. The faucet was cranked wide open and left running, the security deposit be damned.

At first, the Zeroes fought clobs and manacondas, but about halfway to the Dead Zone, the encounters shifted to drowned rats and drowned rats only.

They saw all varieties of the wererats: sharks, piranhas, goldfish, and dolphins. The first battle was with a pack of fifteen rats marching in the direction of Mudsville. The Zeroes had the element of surprise in that fight, but the rats were prepared in every battle that followed.

And the rain wouldn't stop.

Though the Dead Zone was on the itinerary, the party planned to spend very little time in the area. Their intention was to follow their original route to safely collect the loot from the missing number Spawner and move on. They'd make an attempt at procuring a siren trap for Lord Blackwell if the opportunity arose, but that was also hoped to be no more time consuming than a visit to a turnpike rest stop. Getting to the Earth Temple was the primary objective.

But the rats had different plans.

Wayne and Fergus stared down into a muddy but very empty pit. No chests of loot. No Diagnostic Cubes or pedestals. Just dirt and disappointment.

"Rats got here first," Fergus said, half-yelling to be heard over the rain. "Those bastards."

"We left it for a while, not that we had much of a choice."

"Back to the wagon, then?"

Probe.

Wayne expanded his HUD map as far as he could. "Got some reds north of us."

"We don't know a route that goes that direction." On their first trip to the Dead Zone, their Mudsville guide Kenny led the Zeroes on a route she knew to be safe, one where the party was least likely to step in one of the "puddles," her word for the glitched sections of the rainforest.

The dots had the movements of people in camp. Most didn't move, and when something did move, it was brief. If they didn't return to the exact place they were in before, they didn't go far.

"What's that look for?" Fergus asked.

"I kind of want to see why they are holding that position."

"I can go ahead to scout," Margo volunteered.

"We don't have a safe path," Wayne replied.

"As long as you see my dot on the map, you can guide me back. Otherwise, I'm a big girl. I can watch where I step."

Wayne and Fergus shared a long stare. Fergus shrugged.

"Okay," Wayne said, "but be careful."

Though the rain was unpleasant, Wayne imagined it was beneficial for stealth. The heavy downpour created a sort of unending static that drowned out any minor noise. Margo could stop and break a big stick in half with little worry of anyone hearing it, even if they were within feet of her.

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That same static drove mist between the trees and forced someone to wipe their brow over and over to get a good look at anything. If someone caught a glimpse of Margo's shadow, the conditions made it easier for her to disappear again.

"This is… strange," Margo began. "I'm not sure what's happening, but I see a ratman with an hourglass. Seems like he's in charge. Two rats are holding a rope tied off to a metal… cluster. It's intricate, but I don't know what it is, and it's in one of the puddles. One of the rope rats has glitch sickness on his right hand. They're all waiting for the hourglass to run out, I think."

The rest of the Zeroes waited for Margo to continue her report.

"Okay… When the sand was nearly out, they started counting down. They yanked on the rope at the same time to pull the metal out of the glitch, but it disappeared when the puddle moved. Rats farther north, maybe northeast, yelled something back. They all seem agitated, and they reset the hourglass."

"They waited for the shift in glitches before they pulled on the rope?" Wayne asked.

"Looks that way."

Wayne frowned. "Okay, good work. Come back."

"I know that face," Fergus said. "What's wrong?"

"It's a lot to explain. I think we're all cold and tired. It can wait."

"Are we going after them?" Margo asked when she returned.

Wayne shook his head. "We're moving out."

The party retraced the path they had taken to enter the Dead Zone and rejoined Sammy and Vanilli with the wagon. They pressed onward, hoping to reach Drumin's Divide before nightfall. According to the guidebooks, there were shelters for travelers near the bridge, and Wayne very much hoped that was true. Any escape from the rain, no matter how minor, sounded like luxury by this point in their journey.

They managed to travel the rest of the day without an encounter, but they couldn't move quickly enough. They arrived after dark.

The shelters were simple structures with slanted roofs and a back wall to serve as a windbreak. The other sides were open to the elements like any generic park pavilion back on Earth, but these shelters had elevated floors, keeping the party twelve inches away from the wet slop on the ground.

The party was too tired to cook, so they set out their bedrolls, ate beef jerky, and enjoyed the small novelty of not standing in the rain.

"I'm thinking about skipping our plan to look for siren traps," Wayne said, looking out into the darkness with a grim expression. "Everyone is miserable. The sooner we get to the Earth Temple, the sooner we'll be out of the rain for a good while."

"I am in favor," Fergus said.

"How the hells is he asleep already?" Hector grumbled softly, glancing over his shoulder at Armond.

The cleric slept sitting up with his knees pulled to his chest and his entire body cocooned in bedroll and blankets. He had the earned superpower common to career military: Armond could fall asleep swiftly no matter what was happening around him. He could position his gear just so, close his eyes, and that was it.

"Sleeping through the suck makes it easier," Armond said, not opening his eyes. "The time goes faster, and you should never waste a chance to rest."

"But how?" Hector asked. "I'll be lucky to get a few hours in this muck."

Armond shrugged. "Practice, I guess."

Hector scoffed.

Wayne and Fergus smiled to one another, both enjoying the banter of their party.

"Do you have the energy to discuss the Dead Zone, or would you prefer to table it?" Fergus asked, sitting next to Wayne, who sipped at hot tea like it was a priceless beverage.

Wayne wrinkled his face. "I think the rats were trying to item dupe."

Planning this talk was incredibly difficult for Wayne. He had the entire ride from the Dead Zone to the edge of Drumin's Divide to decide how to navigate the topic, but he still floundered.

In short, item duping enabled players in games to copy items, which included stacks of gold. Lots of games had duping glitches.

But Fergus had never played video games.

How could Wayne explain something like the World of Warcraft mailbox dupe to someone who never played an MMO? The mechanics were pretty simple: Send mail to another player with a carefully timed log off. The system ends up thinking the item exists in both places, so the one instance becomes two.

The prerequisites for understanding that simple explanation were knowledge of the internet, familiarity with computers and how they remember things, and why people cared so much about duping in a video game like World of Warcraft.

Explaining packet duping in Diablo II had similar problems. And going anywhere near the Runescape party hat dupe was absolutely not an option. He'd also have to explain why gamers were obsessed with hats, and that was a question he wanted to answer for himself if he was being honest. And the Pokemon MissingNo. dupe? Never even a consideration because that would mean explaining the Pokemon franchise from scratch, and they did not have the time to give that topic the attention and depth it deserved.

"Basically, we can make a copy of an item if we trick a video game system into believing it exists in two places at once. The glitches in the Dead Zone move, and if the system handles that in a certain way, the ingredients for an item dupe are there."

Wayne explained that the idea was to put an object into a glitched square and then remove it right when pieces in the Dead Zone shifted. He believed that information was moving from physical place to physical place to make those shifts possible. Since messing with the connection between how information is moved from place to place in video games was key in most dupes, Wayne felt there was a chance the same could be done with this world's system.

"There are two science fiction stories I know from Earth that look at this as a good thing," Wayne continued. "Infinite production eliminates class differences and frees humanity to build a utopia where people can follow the lives they find to be meaningful."

"But?"

Wayne chuckled. "It destroyed every game economy where it was possible. Infinite anything wrecks supply and demand, and as the buying power of currency shifts, players start to feel like the effort they invested in a game was taken away from them. That item being worth a million gold is much less cool if a million gold becomes chump change because of inflation."

"Are you suggesting part of the ratman war plan is to undermine our world's economy?" Fergus asked skeptically.

"No, but if it ends up being possible and humans learn how to do it… I don't know, man. I'm sure there's a way to handle it so that it's a net gain for society, but I've never heard of how that could work."

"Is this why you have never mentioned duping before?"

"Yes, and I may or may not have tried using Goods Storage and then our new Board command to dupe items."

"Did it work?"

"No."

"But if the rats crack it, they can have an endless supply of any resource their army needs, including demon material," Fergus said, shrugging his shoulders higher to escape the cold. "That would not be ideal, I agree."

"A friend of mine on Earth told me that rat infestations are never eliminated. They just move. It happened to him when his neighbor started laying out traps for all the rats her birdseed attracted. Suddenly, he had a bunch of rats invading his house."

"What are you suggesting?"

Wayne shrugged. "If this is a war in the strategic sense, how we actually root out the enemy instead of just pushing them around the continent? And I can't help thinking Iomallach isn't a great target, so the real frontline is somewhere else."

"I suppose I still think of them as feral opportunists," Fergus admitted, "but we know that's not accurate any more. Could be they're doing what you said."

"They'd have to be, right? Where would all those harpies go? If they're attaching wings to rats, why haven't we encountered any?"

Fergus set aside his empty teacup and pulled his blankets more tightly around himself. "Remember that we aren't the military, and solving the rat problem is not our responsibility."

"I know. I always say I'm not a Hero but I keep catching myself trying to be."

"I assure you that we are doing our part. We help people when they need it. We kill monsters when we see them. And we share what we learn with the proper authorities. Besides, Hector's the youngest combat party member we have, and he's in his late 30s. The Zeroes aren't young soldiers in an elite unit."

"Hard to imagine us being military," Wayne said.

"That's because it's asinine. We're on an adventurous vacation, not a quest to save the world. Keeping this dupe concept a secret is my contribution to preserving society, and I think that action pays my dues for a long time."

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