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Chapter 5: The griefer runs away
The assassin stood at the top of the stairs and listened. There was some activity on the ground floor, but it didn’t sound like anyone was coming up.
He ran the numbers. If they didn’t suspect he was here, he could go back to the window and try for another shot at his target. But if he stayed too long, and got caught, that would be bad. Getting killed immediately would be the best-case scenario. Worst case, they’d take him somewhere to be tortured. He could deal with the torture, but he’d have to stop the griefing, and that wasn’t an option.
When he thought of it that way, the decision was clear.
He hung the windlass and the crossbow across his back and put his cloak back on to hide them, and made sure that his purse was tucked tightly under his shirt. Then he left the room, tiptoed down the hall to the back of the building, and looked out the window overlooking the back alley. He’d left it open deliberately, so he had a quick escape if he needed one. Most criminals got caught because they didn’t think ahead.
Not that he himself was a criminal, the griefer thought. He was just someone in a difficult situation making use of the resources available.
There was nobody in the alley. He was on the third floor. If he climbed over the windowsill and hung down by his fingertips maybe the drop wouldn’t be too high, or he could find a foothold of some kind.
On the other hand, Krim buildings were badly designed. The sill might crack or the cobblestones below could shift as he landed. If he broke his legs, he might not be able to get away. The risk might be low, but it was still a risk, and if he didn’t have to take it… He leaned out the window and looked to the sides. On the left, a pipe came down from the rain cistern on the roof, anchored to the wall by large iron bolts. It didn’t go all the way down to the ground, but entered the building on the ground floor, probably going to either a bathroom or kitchen. Or both. Either way, it would get him down to ground level.
If Krim’s founders had planned ahead better, they would have put the pipes inside the walls, not on the outside. But, in this like most other things, management was incompetent and, like most useful things on Krim, the plumbing was an afterthought. If he was in charge… but there wasn’t any point in thinking about that right now.
The griefer climbed out the window, and, sitting in the window frame, was just able to reach the pipe. He grabbed on tight, swung himself over, then used the bolts as toeholds as he climbed down, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Chapter 6: Trask visits the seamstress
The little bell over the door rang when Trask walked in and a few seconds later shop owner Tottie Lovell came out of a back room.
He held up his badge, to indicate that he was there on official business, but she ignored it.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite customer!” She walked up to Trask and brushed a little piece of lint off his shoulder. “Looks like the sleeves are holding up well.” She peered more closely at a stitch. “Not too many people wear dress clothes every single day.”
“That’s why I’m your favorite customer,” Trask said.
Trask had tried other tailors but none understood both the shape of his body and the shape he wanted to project the way Tottie did. She was good. In fact, she was so popular that she had to hire two assistants to help her with her work.
“Have you seen anyone suspicious come in today?” Trask asked.
“No,” Tottie said, then waved her hand in front of her face. “Ooh, get out of here with your stink.”
“What, me?”
Then Trask looked around and saw that Seymour was standing behind him, notepad raised, pencil at the ready.
“This is private property,” said Trask. “If she says you have to leave, you have to leave.”
“I’ll move your ad to the bottom of page one,” Seymour told Tottie.
“Oh, that’s fine then,” said Tottie. “But try not to touch anything.” She walked to the front of the store and opened the window.
“Is the third-floor room directly above us currently occupied?” Trask pointed up.
“Yes, I rented it to a nice assassin last night,” said Tottie. “Not an Assassin assassin.” She stressed the first “assassin” as she said it. “I don’t think he’s in a guild. More like a wanna-be. You know, black cloak, default crossbow.”
“So, a noob,” said Trask. Or someone pretending to be a noob as a disguise. For a moderate fee, Krim users could go out through the gate and switch out their appearance. So, for example, if you had a hangnail, and you happened to be in the central square, you could hop out, fix it, and hop back in again. With the sorry state of health care on the grid, Krim would have no users at all if there wasn’t a way to fix medical problems.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“I saw the griefer shooting from that window,” Trask said and Tottie gasped and took a step back. “What can you tell me about him?”
“Well, he had plenty of money,” Tottie said. “Metal money, not bank checks. I’m talking a lot of money. At least ten gold coins, I’d say.”
It would have been too much to hope for that the griefer used checks with his name on them, Trask thought.
“Noobs can have money. Not everyone is a living-off-the-land diehard,” Trask said. “But if he rented a room for the night, he’s not a day tripper.” A day tripper wouldn’t need a place on the grid to sleep. He’d just log out. “Hold on. Are you sure he spent the night?”
“Residents have their own entrance,” Tottie said. “And a key. If I’m busy in the store, or in my own rooms upstairs, I probably wouldn’t notice if someone comes or goes.”
“So we’re dealing with someone who could be living online, or who might not,” Trask said. “And might possibly be new to Krim, or might not. But who has money, and can find his way around the city.”
“Are you going to get his description?” Seymour asked.
Trask didn’t see the point. A default avatar was a default avatar.
But Tottie answered the question. “About five ten, one hundred seventy pounds. Average proportions. I’d be able to use one of my standard mannequins easily enough if I needed to make him a suit. Light tan. Brown hair. No scars that I saw. He mostly had the cloak over his face. If I saw him again without the cloak, I probably wouldn’t recognize him.”
“Sounds like a generic, randomly-generated avatar,” said Trask.
“Has your investigation hit a dead end?” Seymour asked.
“No comment,” Trask said.
“Who do you think is funding the attacks?” Seymour said. “A rival grid?”
Trask turned his back to the journalist.
“How will attacks affect the chance of Krim getting outside investment?” Seymour asked, undeterred. “Does the chamber have an official statement about which of the investment groups they prefer?”
This question was even easier to ignore, because Trask didn’t know the answer.
Tottie peered around Trask and asked Seymour, “What investors are those?”
“All the details will be in tomorrow’s paper, assuming my writer ever shows up,” said Seymour. He glanced up as if to check the time in his interface, but there wasn’t one. Then he glanced at his wrist, but there was no watch. Frustrated, he looked around the room.
“It’s a little after two,” Tottie said. “I heard the post office clock ring.”
Seymour relaxed.
Trask was disappointed. He’d hoped that the man had somewhere to be.
“Are Emma and Paulie around?” he asked Tottie. They were her employees, and might have seen something she missed.
“Paulie decided to take some time off,” Tottie said. “All the killing is making him skittish. He signed up to do some heritage stitching, not to get shot at. He ran off the minute the shooting started and is probably well on the other side of the gate by now.”
“And Emma?”
“She’s at her other job. She wants to get the full medieval experience, so she’s also doing deliveries.” Tottie sighed. “Ruining her hands, that’s all she’s doing. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
Trask turned slightly towards the window. “Do you know where she’d be now?”
“No, they changed all the routes and schedules around because of the griefers,” said Tottie. “I was supposed to get a load of supplies today, but I’m not counting on seeing anything until it all dies down.”
So yet another merchant was suffering at the hands of the griefer, Trask thought, and he couldn’t think of anything else to do to investigate. Might as well head back to the office. Seymour would probably follow him, he thought, and then the man would ask Osgar about the lack of progress in the investigation.
Seymour wrote something in his notepad.
“Fortunately, there are several other lines of inquiry that we’re pursing,” Trask said.
“Oh?” Seymour looked up.
“I can’t disclose any details,” Trask said. “Not while the investigation is in progress.”
“Right, right, you don’t want the bad guys to know you’re after them,” Seymour said, putting away his notepad.
Did he sound sarcastic? Yes, he sounded sarcastic, Trask thought, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. That’s just how journalists were. Trask felt tired suddenly. It was past his nap time. He could go back to the office and send Joe out to talk to a few more people. Maybe someone knew something. Or he could just wait. The griefer could have just been blowing off steam and now he was done and things would go back to normal.
Most things tend to resolve on their own.
He turned to leave but then had a thought. He didn’t like having this particular thought. But once he thought it, he was having trouble unthinking it. Why would a griefer with a throw-away default avatar be throwing money around? Why did he rent a room, when there were so many free ways to kill people? Why didn’t he spend money on upgrading his character or getting a better weapon? It was almost as though the griefer wasn’t spending his own money. Maybe Seymour was right and someone was funding him. Ten gold coins was about two thousand dollars worth of spending money. That was a pretty sizeable sum to carry around. This probably wasn’t just a random person letting off steam who’d eventually get tired of griefing and go off to do something else. With money involved, the chamber of commerce would definitely have to take an interest.
Trask sighed.
“That room you rented last night, how do I get to it?” he asked Tottie.
“Follow me.” She pulled a key ring from her pocket, then led the way through the back to a staircase. “It’s up this way.”
Trask held out his hand for the keys. “It might not be safe for you to go up.”
“Thank you.” She flipped through her keys. “It’s this one.”
Trask took it from her and headed upstairs. The stairwell was narrow, and the steps high and unevenly spaced. Halfway up the first flight, he had to stop to catch his breath.
“Can you hurry up?” Seymour said behind and below him. “There’s a comely wench dying at the inn and I want to interview her before she departs this mortal coil.”
“She might come back,” Trask said, panting. But the odds of a tourist coming back to Krim after dying a violent death were very low. And if she came back at all, it would probably be after several years of therapy. Which Krim’s corporate owners would refuse to pay for. That’s what the terms of service were for.
“Maybe you should try to get more exercise,” said Seymour. “You sound like you’re about to have a heart attack.”
“I’m fine,” Trask said. “It’s just the clothes.” If anything, walking around Krim all day wearing the heavy robes meant that he got plenty of exercise. Probably more than he needed. He resumed his climb.
“At this rate, I could pop across the street, get the victim’s entire life story, and be back again before you make it to the next floor.”
“Well, why don’t you do that, then.” But Trask picked up the pace, anyway.
“Slowly, the out-of-shape policeman lumbered up the stairs as the griefer escaped to kill again,” Seymour said.
“Chief of security.” Trask glanced back and saw that the publisher was only pretending to write in his notepad.
“Dozens of other tourists died while…”
Trask glared at the him until the Seymour stopped talking, then resumed his climb.
The griefer’s room, when they finally reached it, was completely empty. Not only was nobody there, but there were also no personal belongings or food wrappers. The bedding on the narrow cot was rumpled, so at least there was evidence that someone had been in the room since the last time Tottie had made the bed. Was it rumpled enough for the griefer to have slept in it? He could have straighted the covers when he woke up. Or did he just lie down for a bit while waiting?
Trask also noticed there was a chair under the window. He assumed that it was normally next to the tiny desk in the corner of the room. The shutters were wide open, the window itself was up, and the curtain was moving slightly in the breeze.
“Must have just missed him,” Trask said, and leaned out the window.
Down below, someone spotted him, pointed up, and screamed.
Trask waved. “It’s just me,” he yelled down. “Marshal Henderson Trask. I’m with the chamber. It’s all clear. The griefer’s gone.” He held out his badge until the pedestrian quieted down.
As everyone resumed their normal activity, Trask tried to remember what the street looked like while the griefer had been shooting.
He himself was right by the inn’s front door when he was shot at, right before he’d gone into the inn. Later on, Seymour fell into the puddle right in front of the inn’s front door. The tourist was right behind him… All easy shots with clear lines of sight from this window. Why did the griefer miss? Maybe it was the steep downward angle.
Of course, Trask didn’t know much about archery since it was something that only roleplayers cared about, and Trask wasn’t a roleplayer. He looked down again. The angle was probably forty-five degrees. That meant that the arrow might end up as much as eight inches too high. At a rough guess, of course. Trask was no expert.
And the unpredictable wind gusts would affect the horizontal trajectory. Someone used to shooting on level ground in an area protected from the wind might not be able to hit anything until they figured out how to compensate.
Roleplayers were always complaining that competition archers were useless in real combat. They droned on and on about it. It really wasn’t something he paid much attention to, of course, since it had nothing to do with his job.
“Are you going to collect fingerprints?” Seymour asked, notepad out.
Trask turned around. Was there a smirk on the man’s face? Was the publisher pulling his leg? “Whatever for?”
“So you are not going to collect fingerprints?” Seymour asked.
“Fingerprinting hasn’t been invented yet,” Trask said. “And would be completely useless on Krim anyway. What would we compare them to? Users can change their avatars every time they go off-world.”
“Were you able to find hair, fibers, or any other forensic evidence at the scene?” Seymour asked.
“You’re right here,” said Trask. “Do you see any evidence?”
“I’m not a professional investigator,” said Seymour.
“And I don’t have a forensics lab,” said Trask.
“Have you considered involving experts at the assassins’ guilds? And the Blackpowder Brotherhood has chemists.”
And the Chubb-Baggins Leper Sanatorium and Heritage Medicine Hospital would have some medical experts, Trask thought, but decided not to mention it. Though if he was able to find some hairs, he might be able to borrow a microscope… no. That could set a very dangerous precedent. If he looked for forensic evidence here, people would expect him to do the same at all crime scenes. That wouldn’t do.
“I can’t comment on the scope of the investigation,” Trask said.
“So… no?”
“So, no comment,” Trask said. “Anyway, I’m not even sure a crime has been committed in this room. Attempted murder isn’t against Krim’s terms of service. And neither is actual murder. And even if it was, terms of service enforcement isn’t my job.”
“What exactly is your job, then?” Seymour’s pencil was at the ready, and Trask suddenly realized that he needed to be very careful about what he said next. Or maybe he should say nothing at all.
“For personnel matters, you should contact the chamber of commerce directly,” he finally told Seymour. “I suggest that you talk to Osgar Sigeweard, the director of…”
“I still know who he is,” Seymour interrupted. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t know what your own job is?”
Trask took a breath and reminded himself not to engage, then turned around and looked at the room.
Murder wasn’t a crime, but harassing tourists was a terms of service violation. If Trask caught the griefer, he might be able to have the grid administrators ban him. Not just kick him off Krim for two weeks, but ban him for good. That would put the merchants at ease and would certainly impress Osgar.
Trask took one last look around and walked out of the room. The griefer didn’t go downstairs. Trask would have seen him come out of the building, or Tottie would have noticed him.
Seymour joined Trask in the hallway and Trask closed the room’s door. The curtain had been blowing in the wind, Trask thought, when he’d seen the griefer in the window. That meant a cross-breeze. Did the griefer leave his door open? He looked at it and saw that the door didn’t fit well into its frame, with at least an inch of clearance both at the top and bottom. Must be hard to stay warm in the winter. He looked down the hallway. The window at the far end was open. That explained the cross-breeze.
Trask went over to the window and looked out. There was a heavy water pipe to the left. Trask followed it up with his eyes. The griefer could have climbed up to the roof. Weren’t assassins always running across rooftops? Or he could have gone down into the alley.
Either way, he was long gone.