Cass had awakened Lucky in the middle of the night (as well as the many women who were sleeping in his enormous bed). After a negotiation dulled by sleep, he had consented, in the night, to grant Cass a roc bird topped with a small tent.
- "Even though you should sleep, Stella… there's still room in this bed…" - "I will sleep someday… soon, I hope."
The roc bird, immense, made houses tilt with a flap of its wings. Powerful and fast, it had taken off due south and flown over the infinite world of Trust until the last hamlet she had conquered - recognizable by a flag - and then a bit farther. The sun was rising when Cass set foot on the ground: a plain planted with dragonblood trees, crisscrossed by wide, as-yet unnamed rivers, with, in the distance, high and rounded earth-colored mountains.
She began running eastward: first in long strides to get back into rhythm, then, once her body's mechanics had fully adapted, she started a sprint that would never stop. Her strides were powerful, leaving deep prints in the ground; had she had a ribbon tied to her belt, it would have floated for twenty meters behind her.
She encountered many birds, trees, and treasures, which she named using an automatic, standardized nomenclature, amassing "gold coins" whose purpose she did not understand. And of course, she encountered hamlets: African huts, English cottages, turf houses or dwellings suspended in trees, caves, massive carved crystals, holes in the ground, lighthouses by the sea, and modern vacation homes - hamlets, then, that she passed in an instant, just long enough to name them, to establish a breeding pen, to create a path to the previous hamlet, and to move on.
Six days and nights passed at this exhausting pace, and she saw again the high, round, earth-colored mountain from the beginning of her journey and slowed her rhythm... she caught her breath and closed her eyes without yielding to sleep. She sat down on a large rock just as a butterfly with wings of silvery light, the A44, landed on her nose.
First stage complete.
It was Aristotle Chike, young Lord of the Cauldron and recent recruit to the Storm Company, who was the first to stumble upon the path linking two of Stella of the Black Star's hamlets.
Cass was summoned by an Arch, and, curious, she crossed it. She found herself at a crossroads, a bit farther west, between H55 and H56, two hamlets styled after American colonial houses. It was in a damp valley (V151), planted with willows that glowed at night (P1087).
Aristotle looked like a knight, mounted on a black warhorse with a golden mane, and his armor was made of glass tinted white.
- "Lady Stella of the Black Star," he said politely, bowing,
"I seek a connection to your hamlets. Naturally, a high-level connection would suit me, but perhaps you have a proposal."
- "I'm not interested," said Cass without looking at him, scanning the surroundings. If only she could teleport through an arch that quickly… instead of walking or using mounts…
- "A low-level connection suits me as well. I'll continue southward."
Cass turned back toward the Arch.
- "Wait, Lady Stella. You must connect your hamlets! Otherwise you'll never make progress!"
- "We'll see."
And she disappeared.
Aristotle, annoyed, took it in stride and spurred his horse to follow the road toward the western hamlet H56. From there, a new road led to another hamlet, and he attempted another path connection.
This time, Lady Stella did not even cross the Arch. She replied through the in-game messaging system, a dove carrying an envelope:
"No connection possible. Move along."
Stella had discovered in the past six days the equivalent of one-tenth of everything uncovered and named by players since the beginning of Trust. Among them, artifacts capable of shaking up the game: stones that produced a new kind of electrical energy (R7011), unlocking a new building in every city - the Guild of Machines - and also a new leafy plant (P10002) which, when smoked, granted a sixth sense. Migratory birds (A211) that enhanced map precision, a titanic beetle, the size of a city (A4331), that could have served as a king's mount. All these riches were recorded in the buildings of the Explorer's Guild in every city, and thousands of exploitation requests were pouring in.
Cass asked Lucky for the help of thirty AI servants to process them on her behalf… with only one instruction: refuse them all.
Aristotle Chike filed his report with the Storm Company, which had already received numerous similar and troubling reports - as had all the other player clusters. The situation was very concerning, and in the ensuing panic, the major player associations had agreed to hold an emergency meeting. Ariane of the Black Crow had been invited to host it in Celestial Rome, the capital metropolis of her empire, but she had refused. It was ultimately Deirdre who organized and presided over it, in a vast stadium carved into the heart of an iceberg drifting on the Sea of Dead Stars. Her ice-white face, crossed only by her black eyes, seemed emotionless amid the animated discussions of the cluster leaders, while the thousands of seats for spectators were occupied by players of fantastical and unique appearances.
The leader of the Chessboard - one of the oldest player groups, whose face was made of polished wood - cut through the outraged babble by raising his voice and capturing everyone's attention:
- "We have always believed that, given the infinite play area, the entire strategy lay precisely in managing proximity. But I get the impression that all the surface currently occupied by players is now enclosed by Stella."
- "That's impossible and you know it," thundered Alice, the immense and all-muscle leader of the Gentlemen group. "You can link hamlets together, but you can't make a circle - that is, link a hamlet back to itself, even with intermediaries. Otherwise, we'd all have tried. Trust is a negotiation game, not a board game."
- "She's cheating, that's all," said Deirdre, in a tone as glacial as her appearance. "She's been playing for less than a month and supposedly enclosed the entire explored play area? That strategy isn't even theoretically possible - mounts have a limited travel distance."
- "She's not cheating, if we're to believe the moderators," replied the Chessboard leader.
- "Oh really, you know how to contact a moderator?" asked Deirdre.
- "Yes. Come on, we're in crisis mode and we need to move forward, so I'll give this major piece of information for free - and I hope to receive other generous pieces in return. You can interact with a moderator through the Meditation Room."
A murmur spread through the stands. One of Trust's mysteries, solved.
- "Since we're spilling everything," said a teenager with short blond hair and a simple staff, who called himself Eric of the Lightbulb, "I figured out how we got trapped. She made a U-shaped barrier in the south, and an N-shaped one in the north. I thought, maybe I can squeeze between the right bars of the U and the V, but her strategy is flawless: the paths touch. There's no room to create a new path in between."
Once again, outraged cries rippled through the whispers in the stands.
- "Game design flaw," sighed the Chessboard leader.
- "Julia Prahi, if you can hear us…" murmured a tall, gaunt, nameless man, making the sign of the cross.
- "And now what?" exclaimed Alice impatiently. "I only see one solution: start again from zero, on the other side of the barrier. That would give other players an enormous advantage. Dammit!"
- "Let's call it what it is: she came to screw with us," concluded Deirdre. "She's a troll. Sure, we could start from scratch - hundreds of new players join every day anyway - but she could just pull the same stunt again, and we'd be trapped like today. There is, in the colossal effort Stella is putting in, an objective, and she's going to make it known soon. She doesn't want to conquer the Throne of the Gods… that desire comes with time invested. She wants to show she's the strongest. She wants to promote another video game. Maybe she's one of those anti-game activists from the After. A troublemaker, damn it! But we can screw with her too! All we'd need… all we'd need is to create an empire and merge it with Ariane's. Or just threaten to."
- "We've been negotiating that for years," sighed Adelgundis of the 2048. "And now it would just happen overnight? I don't really believe it."
- "That will be Plan B," said Alice. "Someone needs to finish this damn game so we're no longer hostages to a stranger."
- "There is another option," declared the Chessboard leader, "but it's going to require a pact of trust as strong as that of Plan B."
Everyone held their breath, and silence poured over the assembly, for he was a master strategist. He continued:
- "My view is different from our hostess's. I think Stella wants to win the game, like the rest of us, and therefore she wants to create her Empire. Her strategy is a power play to negotiate. She's going to select a few happy few to make connections at her hamlet border and form an Empire. If one of those happy few is here, well, as soon as they make a connection, they'll open the road to all of us and we can build extensions beyond her barrier. We can make the Betrayal Pact right here and now."
- "The Betrayal Pact… and what if she has spies in this noble assembly?" - "It wouldn't change much."
- "Fine," said Deirdre. "Who's against the Betrayal Pact?"
No one answered, in a silence that grew oppressively heavy.
- "United in betrayal, then. Wait and see."
She stood up, signaling the others to leave. There was excitement in the air: rarely had Trust's players been so united. But Adelgundis had a bad feeling.
Or maybe she just came to screw with us, she thought. After all, her only friend is that anarchist bastard Lucky.