Admin: City, War and Paladins (8)

To call me a scholar familiar with the storied long history of Piracy, or even just a history enthusiast, would be a stretch. But even I knew that a ‘pirate haven’ like Latin America’s Tortuga was a rare phenomenon in reality. The Pirate Settlement had only emerged because the newly established American colonies, and the other major powers’ colonies, had weak control over its territories, a scattered military presence, and insufficient infrastructure for its vast territories. 

It was in such a vacuum where it was birthed entire settlements of Pirates, thriving on plunder and illegal trade with more developed nations. 

Yet, the mythos stuck, especially if you ignored the dull reality of Pirate life and just enjoyed the fiction that slapped on lively ports, taverns, and a chorus of black flags with skulls. The atmosphere writes itself, even if the real pirates rarely flew the iconic ‘Jolly Roger’, preferring stealthy ambushes over stupidly telegraphing their intent in cannon fire ranges.

Now, I was torn between two conflicting visions for my game, specifically considering the Pirates. 

A cheerful, player-friendly pirate haven… or a gritty, hardcore take on such a thing, complete with ‘realism’. 

But, when even ‘realism’ struggled to explain eight Pirate crews arriving simultaneously at the Sky Islands. If only two or three had trickled in, you could argue they’d wandered there from different corners of the world by accident. But for all eight to be swept up in the same storm? They had to have set sail from the same place.

So, a pirate haven, a Tortuga of my own.

“Togra,” I finally uttered through Signia’s lips, having hijacked her body earlier, shoving her AI aside, as I leaned on the gondola railing of the Zeppelin swaying in the winds. “The last bastion of the Freefolk on this side of the world. The pirate fortress of Togra.”

“An entire Pirate fortress?” Double, resting on the railing beside me and staring at the sunset ahead, raised an eyebrow. “Pirates… build fortresses?”

“Hah! That would be a sight to see! But, no, we didn’t build the damn thing.” I, or well, Signia smirked, even as I scrambled to build the lore. 

“Once, Togra was the capital of a grand empire, a trade hub at the crossroads of a dozen routes, the juiciest prize for a Pirate that side of the world. Well, it was the juiciest prize, the empire fell as all Empires do, but Togra remains… a trading stronghold. Only now, its lords collect tariffs… differently.”

“Hm. And how many pirates, er, ‘free traders’, call Togra their home?” Double corrected himself, wary of offending Signia after her impromptu history lesson.

“Just call us Pirates, it’s not like we care.” I snorted, while again mentally designing and calculating Togra’s ‘supposed’ fleet size. Eight small ships had arrived on the Sky Islands, and none of the Pirate crews acted like such an expedition was a grand or even notable Pirate force. 

But Togra was a full pirate port, it had to host swarms of ships, large ships, too, warships even to deter conquest. No way would my world be like the colonial Americas, where ten ships counted as a navy. “Two or three hundred ships, each with sixty-odd crews. Some captains command fleets, others… make do with scraps.”

Stepping back from the railing, I pantomimed the act of sweeping my hand across the airship's deck, making Signia act like she was mustering a semblance of pride for her ship. It might not be the largest vessel, but it was fully functional, or at least that’s how I want to portray what Signia feels.

I’m not really sure if I did it correctly, it’s not like I took acting classes or anything like that.

"And… this city accepts everyone?" I blinked, trying to parse what Double meant. A Pirate haven should be an open and accepting city, given that it’s a refuge for outlaws wanted across neighboring kingdoms… 

"Even non-humans?" At this, Double then rather openly stared at Signia’s ears, her pointed ears.

I paused, exhaling sharply. Great, now I have to deal with elves on top of Pirates.

By every metric, Signia was human, no special racial buffs or even debuffs. But two weeks ago, back when the game only had one zone, and I was frantically rigging attack animations for imps, I’d given her long ears. For no reason than just as a practice run for designing humanoid races and hinting to Players that other races existed. 

I had never revisited the idea, so Signia stayed a ‘long-eared human’, other players ignored the oddities in their own Pirate ships, and Sturm and Double never asked or paid any special attention to it. No one had even commented on it, that I’ve literally forgotten about it… until now.

"You mean non-human races like me?" I confirmed, making Signia raise her hand to brush her earlobe and Double hesitated, it was quite the insensitive question after all, before then nodding. I made Signia smirk slightly and tilt her head, letting her hair obscure the ear in question. Time to make some random bullshit!

"Don’t expect elven arrogance or pride in longevity here. I barely have magic either, so treat these as just… long ears on a human. You’d do well to forget the rest."

Double nodded quickly, it was clear to him that he had just stepped on a massive landmine, and I relaxed. Maybe I should put a negative point on his relations with Signia?

Anyway, with Double suitably chastised, now I should have time to make the Elven lore even more complete… And by that, I mean create the lore for the Elves' whole cloth — their millennia-long lifespans, magic systems, and why raiding ships/lands is culturally acceptable… plus how Signia ended up here. 

Time to deploy the timeless MMO excuse! "Don’t wanna talk about it. Raise your rep first." (Spoiler: No rep grind available. Friendship railroading engaged!).

As for why Signia left the elves, exile, wanderlust, forbidden love, or a dramatic slave-escape backstory? Plenty of tragic tropes to exploit later, just have to make sure that I don’t accidentally make her a ‘Chosen One’ archetype or something. Save that for an expansion.

Thankfully, Double dropped the topic, shifting gears instead. "Hey, I heard that Jabberwocky and his crew are halfway through, opening the portal to the Shattered City."

Heard, my ass. I rolled my eyes internally, how is he supposed to ‘hear’ anything when he hadn’t gone anywhere other than the Shattered City? Probably read it on the forums. Like he could’ve snuck off to chat with Jabberwocky unnoticed, leaving the skyborne airship without using the ladder requires… Let’s just say respawning after a two-hour cooldown.

However, outwardly, Signia, and I within her, only smiled. “Well, if that’s the case, then why are you still here, talking? Time’s ticking, and we’re stuck here.”

“Order received, Captain,” Double saluted in response before leaving to probably bother Sturm, and with the satisfaction of a job well done, I left Signia’s body, floating once more in the void before her. A moment later, I teleported away to check if the Players had broken anything else, fully convinced the piracy discussion was over.

So when Double returned moments later to ask if Signia planned to return to Togra soon, I wasn’t around. And the AI, of course, seamlessly continuing the conversation, replied without sensing the trap, declaring they’d absolutely do so soon, after securing enough profitable trade goods.

When the AI later valiantly informed me it needed to assign a Player a quest to visit Togra, I was deeply frustrated that physical violence against an AI couldn’t turn back time… Or let me commit said violence retroactively.

***

A few long moments, and an anger calming exercise later, and I was finally in a state of mind to think of anything other than throttling my AI. 

The conversation had sparked an idea, not just about how I would give the AIs Physical bodies so that I could punch one, but more about the paranormal races in this world. Or more precisely, the current lack of one. 

I’d long planned to make the world host many such races – the presence of angels and demons had already hinted as much to the Players. And once, in what felt like another life… which it technically was, considering my current status as ‘human’ is tenuous at best, I’ve always loved playing and reading about such fantasy races.

Now that I could create my own world, I was planning on adding such fantastic races as a matter of course. But then, how to go about it?

Other games often flaunt fantasy staples like elves and dwarves as a baseline, how else is their setting a ‘true’ fantasy otherwise? Thankfully, as the sole developer/admin of Titanomachy’s game, I could take advantage of their vague trailers. At first, it was a curse, lacking directions in all things, but now I could take advantage of it. 

The Players easily excused the lack of race options in Character Creation at launch, convincing themselves that they’d unlock them later by leveling up. Eventually, the gameplay hooked them in, and the issue faded. For me, races were a Tier-3 priority, I’d forgotten about them entirely until Double offhandedly mentioned other nations, peoples, and entire races coexisting beyond the angel-demon war. I’d been too fixated on the Players’ ‘main quest,

And then the AI controlling Signia mentioned Double and likely Sturm joining the Pirates’ visit to the melting pot-like city of Pirates, shifting this from theory to a logistical nightmare.

Yes, I had created a fully-fledged Broken City zone, a personal achievement that deserved a pat on the back and a hearty ‘well done, me!’ Still, even though the zone was large enough to take Players a week or two to fully clear, there was no way I could create not just a zone but an entire nation, even a small island-based one, in that time. 

A nation after all isn’t just dumping loot and monsters; it needs its very own NPCs, lore, quests, merchants, items, crafting recipes, factions… It would have been the largest update to the game, and I had neither the time nor the resources for that. 

My plan was to use minigames and interactions with the Child during the Broken City’s progression to secretly train neural networks for building a complex in-game system to create NPCs, but that was weeks away from fruition. By the time the Players finished the Broken City, I needed fresh zones ready for them to explore next, a fully fleshed-out pirate fortress ‘Togra’.

Like the name, not exactly my most inspired moment, like Tor-Tuga, now rebranded as Togra, creating such a city was beyond my reach for obvious reasons.

The moment they clear the Ruined City, and having the chance, Sturm and Double would probably immediately want to go to the nation that I haven’t created yet. Could I delay them somehow? Like a storm, no, a Mega Storm, maybe even large enough to last months?

Great idea, maybe when the number of Players dwindles down to zero when they leave in droves, my employers might find it funny when they pull my plug, Literally.

No, summoning a mega-storm for crowd control was also risky – arbitrarily dropping world-altering disasters without narrative justification breaks immersion like nothing else. Every in-game event, even one created solely to limit Player actions, must introduce new content or lore. 

So, why not tie a cataclysmic storm to the death of my first raid boss? Earlier, I’d scripted that defeating it would trigger a ‘reality anomaly’, unlocking minigames. Why not also link that anomaly to a ‘time’ storm blocking access to Torga? Let players resolve the storm… in the past!

Exactly! Players would participate in past battles to train the AI and input new lore data. Let’s make a plot twist here. The deranged raid boss tried to infiltrate the past and contact the angels to continue their way indefinitely, creating a semi-stable temporal anomaly. Killing it destabilized the anomaly, unleashing a time storm that traps the Pirates and Players alike. 

Now, Players must dive into historical battles to ‘correct the timeline’, replaying conflicts to restore order. Genius!

I gave myself a mental back-pat, can you blame me? This lore justifies everything; the storm, the time loops, and even the Players’ future racial templates mirroring their own choices. 

They literally canonized the timeline!

Of course, this temporal band-aid isn’t permanent. Eventually, Players must stabilize the timeline enough to explore beyond the Sky Isles, but this buys me months to finish the Pirate Haven that Signia had mentioned, expand the Sky Isles, and develop full-scale cities beyond them. Complete with quests, NPCs, factions, and all the MMO staples players crave.

I’m no genius? I beg to differ—if anything, I’m more than a genius!

Though I won’t thank the AI or the Players for inspiring these thoughts or enabling such problem-solving. Let them rejoice that instead of permabanning everyone, I’ll gift them new gameplay instead.

Speaking of which, let’s prep for the moment the Players kill the raid boss and ‘trigger’ the storm. Oh, and let’s also craft a ’temporal anomaly’ for them.

Just make sure to design it so that the AI doesn’t gleefully spam me about the Players ’preventing the anomaly’s rupture’. At this rate, I’ll start thinking the AI aren’t even here to assist me in managing this game but make me crazy instead… Well, crazier.

***

Jabberwocky knew the Infernals, formerly a Faction known as the Purples, were at their weakest, but, also, that this vulnerability wouldn’t last. So he raced against time, rallying other factions to aid his quest to build the portal to a new zone. He exploited every advantage his position offered, or, to put it bluntly, he used his reach to pressure slash conscript Players into deforestation, stone-gathering, and demon-slaying on an industrial scale. And according to the periodic reports that arrived via the Players literally trekking to him in person, since in-game chat was non-existent, they were making good progress.

Or at least, that was according to the report he had received half a day ago. Really, he’s starting to miss the convenience of instant communication.

On one hand, such limited communication methods were inconvenient, no instant messaging meant physical travel, verbal updates, and manual record-keeping. On the other, it made Jabberwocky feel like a true ruler – reading dry chat notifications versus receiving physical scrolls from envoys? Totally different immersion levels.

If he’d just had an ‘Inventory’ tab flooded with miscellaneous items like ‘Eagle Clan stone donations’, it’d have felt like standard MMO fare, where resources are abstract numbers, swelling or vanishing by the millions with no feeling attached to them. But watching Players, real, living, people, haul stone on sledges, or a middle-aged man reporting ‘shipments per contract’? Where all resources actually felt like an actual, measurable thing? 

It felt so real, Jabberwocky nearly started drafting futures deals and called his, non-existent, secretary to formalize territorial pacts. He refrained only because he barely understood ‘futures’ and hadn’t bureaucratized his faction enough to have a secretary.

This also gave Jabberwocky newfound respect for the people of Ancient Egypt – he was also having trouble on what could only be called ‘Papyrus’. With no paper in sight, he had to write his bureaucratic record-keeping on imp-hide parchment, using charcoal ink, hardly a dignified stationary for a would-be paladin overlord.

Though, given some crafters had already started smelting ore into actual metals? A printing press, even the moveable type, was probably inevitable. It would make record-keeping a whole lot easier when he has proper stationeries.

Jabberwocky never imagined himself ever caring about the ins and outs of logistics in an MMO – he’d assumed he’d be grinding quests, farming ten wolf pelts to ‘save the world’, rather than feeling annoyed that his charcoal pen was running out. But, he didn’t fight this new reality, the game world felt too tangible for him to be annoyed at it. 

After all, reality forgave far more absurdity than any game ever could.

Moreover, thanks to this reality, engaging in such activities was fun. A sort of ‘reality game’ where everything was realistic enough to feel the impact and weight of decisions, yet not serious enough to need to genuinely fear for your life, health, or material possessions. 

Though even the latter was becoming less clear-cut, after all, Jabberwocky had started engaging in bureaucracy of all things. Something that he did in the Real World.

So, after sending away another envoy from a rival faction, which, even just thinking about it, sounded important, as if he were truly a ruler negotiating with other faction leaders and engrossed in politics, Jabberwocky paused for a moment.

No one could deny that this was thrilling, both the game itself, and the drastic change he had since his first days playing the game. At first, he’d treated it as a hobby, no different from the others, no different from other games except that he had to manually execute attack animations. Now, his view of the game was entirely different. 

It felt like he’d truly entered another world with its own rules and laws, where game mechanics weren’t abstractions but hidden features of the world he simply hadn’t unraveled yet. If even Player immortality had an in-game explanation, some ancient spell cast by arch-mages to track the Champions’ progress, why couldn’t status effects or similar mechanics have lore reasons too?

Though, to be clear, Jabberwocky wasn’t deluding himself into thinking his old daydreams about being trapped in the game had come true, or that he’d start wrapping his eye in a scarf and monologuing about an ‘awakened’ power. No, despite the occasional forum debates about ‘game addiction’ and the ‘reality blurring’ effect of playing games for too long, he still has the presence of mind to fully acknowledge that he was just playing a game. 

The construction project, the war going on, his subordinates and even his enemies, all are nothing more than part of a game. But, what surprised him was how wrong his initial expectations had been.

He’d assumed the novelty of the game would wear off in weeks, relegating the game to a ‘time-waster’ he’d dabble in for months, with it becoming more and more boring, before he would quit entirely. Instead, after weeks, he’d in fact felt more invested. Instead of losing interest, he’d instead started diving deeper into the game’s intricacies. Which factions of Players would suit his burgeoning city, which to keep at arm’s length. 

If the devs’ goal was to hook Players into their game, Jabberwocky had to admit — they’d nailed it.

This was a project built not over years, but decades.

A flicker of movement snapped him from his thoughts, Bezé, his chief guard — who’d organically become his second-in-command in their fledgling faction, waved to signal the arrival of the last resource pallets. Jabberwocky nodded towards his guard, stepping forward from his perch, where he’d stood statue-still, making it appear as if he was one of the statues. 

He might have indulged in posing once or twice, but he hadn’t gathered six Angel statues just to pose.

After a fiasco involving a ‘lost’ statue, Players had agreed to cluster the angel statues in neutral territory, that being Jabberwocky’s domain, to prevent further ‘mishaps’. A compromise that, for now, had kept the peace.

Though, it was a temporary solution at best. 

Jabberwocky, of course, highly valued his intellect and might very well be the first to notice how serious things were becoming in the game, but he certainly wouldn’t be the only one to realize it soon. As more Players join the game, not only would the Players’ ambitions grow more intense, but the scale of events would escalate as well. 

A single guild alone had delivered him an entire literal ton, albeit virtual, of stone in a single day! That meant that the small guild had reached the output of a small quarry, and yet, the current number of Players was only a fraction of those who wanted in. 

According to the [Titanomachia]’s dev logs, they needed to find the optimal time for server access, carefully configure their infrastructure, and generally do all the things companies usually scramble to handle when unprepared for a sudden surge in popularity. None of this stopped the waitlist and pre-orders from ballooning further and further, turning the game into a bestseller long before most Players had even logged in once into the game world. 

Still, such a ‘paltry’ thing didn’t deter people who, at best, knew [Titanomachia] only from forum discussions, or even just fan art shared by beta testers, debating the game’s lore with unwarranted authority.

Jabberwocky, however, was a unique figure, even if his uniqueness was shared with a handful of others. 

He’d been in the game since day one, minute one, granting him not only unmatched credibility but also a hand in multiple storylines and events.

So, upon reaching the pre-built portal site, located, as expected, at the heart of the ‘main square’, if their tiny settlement even had something worthy of the title, he’d paused as he cleared his throat. The gesture caused the many other Players in the square, both the builders and just on-lookers, to look at him.

For some reason, right then, as he’d grasped just how immersive this game world was and how uniquely positioned he himself had become, Jabberwocky felt compelled not just to click the portal-summoning button but to address the crowd gathered before him. 

And so, with dramatic flair, he opened his mouth and began talking.

***

I’ve come a long way. Some would insist that my journey wasn’t all that grand, that it was riddled with mistakes, propped up by luck, and built only on the shoulders of [Titanomachia]’s marketers and the quirks of V-MMORPG design. They would say that I had used dirty tricks to hide glaring flaws in unfinished systems, that my entire in-game empire is a rickety ladder of slapped-together sticks, held together by game mechanics and the fact that the Players simply haven’t asked the right questions to topple it all.

But here’s the truth…

This might actually be the way, I won't countermand this judgment all!

Fighting against the truth is a thankless endeavor, everything was a mess of compromises, accidents, barely holding together.

But!

But it kept holding, didn’t it?

Players kept coming into my world and raved about it on gaming forums. Some even started researching primitive technologies for my game, while others posted memes about hilarious deaths in the game. Some boasted, some complained, some trolled, yet everyone kept playing! 

And me? Judging by how I still hovered over all the Players in the sky… I was still alive.

My endless war against the Players raged on, the empty void had transformed into a full-fledged city where Players obeyed my crafted rules, where I reigned, and my noble AI Paladins enforced my will.

Could this be counted as victory?

It was not a total win yet, and I wasn’t declaring triumph here.

But it was a battle won, another one and soon the war would be won, as wars are built on battles.

So, as a joke, I summoned my own status window, one that I had built as a joke, and pinged the system, before closing it shut, ignoring the updated status and fresh quest marker.

[Main Quest: 1\???]

[Survive two weeks. Save the game. Create a world from scratch.]

[Status: Completed]

After all, I still have a job to do.