By David C. Daoust
Ratchet was grouchy. He was not happy to see Harper at the moment. –And– he was a bit too grouchy to care who cared. He felt he was a little too busy to deal with all that at the moment. They were currently lost in the desert.
The lot of them stuck within a massive vehicle of a machine that had been highjacked, and then left powerless in the middle of nowhere. The controls pretty much completely rerouted through a program that locked, all those aboard, out of all the Rover’s normal systems.
The only work around Ratchet could think of, was to play along with the system provided. The ‘system provided’, was what presented itself as a game– a multiplayer game, that tricked unwitting gamers into providing the intelligence behind a small army of ‘Battle-drones’. Battle-drones that had previously knocked down the small port town of Grady as though it was a sandcastle. Since then, one such Battle-drone had seized control of the massive Rover they were occupying!
That was before the server had been severed.
For no real reason that Ratchet, or anyone else aboard the vehicle, knew, the vehicle was no longer being controlled by an outside force. While it was clear they had been freed from the high-jacker, the entire hodgepodge crew, quickly found that despite this, they could not restore the normal controls. They did, however, have access to the game, or program, that allowed the battle-drone to interface with the massive vehicle.
Ultimately, Ratchet was trying to control the Rover, through the drone, using said game. All this would be on a local server, rather than the game server that had allowed the Rover to be controlled from afar. It all seemed to be working as expected, except that the game had strict rules about how high a skill level a player would need, for their ‘spider-mech’, the in-game term for the battle-drone, to highjack a machine the size of the Rover.
Thus, Ratchet found himself grinding through a game, all to up an in-game side-skill, which would allow him to take control of the drone that had control of the vehicle… and get them out of their current situation. Doubly thus, he did not have much of an urge to greet the newly arrived Harper.
There was a chance it was because he was stuck grinding through the video game before him… Ultimately, he had just spent, the majority of the hours between their last meeting, trying to get a little virtual bar to fill… it was a tedious task that seemed unending.
Of course, there was always just the fact that he was kind of ticked-off that Harper had completely forgotten why, exactly, they had tried to restore the bot, Margo, to a body that could, ultimately, be questioned. That ‘why’ being in the hopes of finding out what had happened to Ratchet’s missing family members that had disappeared after the original Drone Attack- the one on Grady. Ratchet could not help but feel it would have been a different story if it had been her family members that were missing.
Restoring control to the rover was only half the plan. Fact was, despite Harper ‘forgetting’ to question Margo, Ratchet had gained some intel on where at least one of his family members may be. In fact, the small holo-bot, Hamlin, was actually on the moon, to help free his Aunt Mari, from the Ark-temple, far to the north. All the way to the north, in fact, considering it was built on the small moons northern poll.
So, the new plan, was to take the Rover all the way north, up through the frozen tundra, and pick Mari up themselves.
Most of which had just been explained to Harper while Ratchet continued to mind-numbingly grind his way to another skill point.
“So, wait,” Harper queried with a rather askew look on her face “The game Arachnoid was linked to battle-drones?”
“Yes,” Olivia confirmed.
“So… that big first raid that I missed, because of the sudden battle-drone raid on Grady…” Harper pieced it together, “was actually the very same raid?”
“I’d say you get it,” Olivia nodded, as she shot her husband an amused look, “Faster than I did, to boot.”
“Well, I play a splicer,” Harper offered, “Maybe I can get on my guy…”
“That won’t work,” Grace interrupted, “We don’t have access to the old servers…”
“Yeah,” Dicey, in turn, interrupted Grace, “none of us can use our old accounts!”
“That’s why we all had to start from the beginning,” Grace finished the explanation.
“Honestly, I had never heard of this game,” Hugo added in, “Seems I’m rather out of touch, anymore, with the latest craze… I was still playing Archeologist’s Canyon.”
“Oooh, that’s a good one!” Dicey hopped a little excitedly, “Lets play that one for a while!”
“No– we’re not just playing random games, Dicey,” Olivia let the little girl down, “We have to get this vehicle operational.”
“I know, but I mean we could take a break,” Dicey was only a bit crestfallen, clearly just trying to stay involved. Possibly, just trying to stay awake; they had been at it for a while.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Harper asked as something caught her eye on screen.
Ratchet, who had just, in-game, descended his ‘spider-mech’ into a deep dark cavern full of oversized creatures suddenly realized she was talking to him.
“I’m going to mind control this creature,” he explained.
“But why?” Harper asked, clearly perplexed.
“Did you not pay attention?” Ratchet’s grouchy-ness rising to the forefront, “We need the skill-point.”
“I mean, yeah,” Harper nodded, “but don’t mc the green ones!”
“Why?” Ratchet, further irritated, asked.
“It will send the rest of the critters scattering! Green ones only give one point!” Harper explained, “You got to use the purple ones. There is a purple one right next to it. It will give you five points, easy.”
Ratchet had not even noticed that the critters had different colors, let alone that some them may be better than others. After so many hours of grinding for one point, this knowledge was just a bit too much.
“Fine, great!” Ratchets anger suddenly flared. He rose to his feet and threw the controller into the seat he’d just vacated, “I’m glad you know how to play- Why don’t you go ahead and show us all how it’s done?”
“I will!” Harper, without the slightest inkling what his problem may be, angrily retorted. She snatched up the controller and yelled back, “Why don’t you go take a nap! While I take care of this!”
“Good!” Ratchet stormed out of the family room, leaving the room full of shocked faces far behind as he marched through the corridors.
He heard Harper’s muffled retort, “Learn-to-play!” come through the wall.
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