We all know this setup, right? The super-futuristic virtual reality MMO slash theme park, the kind Ernest Cline wrote about and then Spielberg made into that godawful movie. Well, guess what? When you get the brightest and best minds from Blizzard, Sony and Nintendo in a room, that shit's inevitable. And it happens fast, lemme tell you that. The first build for Moebius only rolled out five years ago, and it's only gotten bigger since.
My name? Look that up yourself. My Creds are right there. That's 'credentials', by the way - name, age, gender, world location. Guess the way to solve online identity shit was to throw up your hands and go 'fuck it'. But it's easer to go by my handle - Wolf. Trust me, that'll make sense later.
I started like anyone else did - a casual. Got the start-up kit as a Christmas present. Nothing fancy - tactile feedback gloves, standard visor, motion tracking pad. And for a while? That was enough. The novelty of instantly going into fantasy land made up for all the shortcomings. Okay, so I was really in the basement fumbling around with subpar equipment. But at the push of a button, I could go from flying in outer space to fighting pirates on the high sea. It was amazing.
When I began, I did what I imagine tourists do in a new country. I wandered around, got mixed up in shit, took part in things I barely comprehended. I went on a few raids, got some kills, made some bucks. Died a lot, too. I was pretty pathetic at first, with no idea about stats or weapon specialisation, so anyone could wipe the floor with me. I only got traction when I dug my heels in and got decent at duel handguns, but I still hadn't a dime's worth of a clue.
Then I met Asuka.
God, I know that sounds so fucking cliché. Innocent flower meets snarky vet, romance sparks. But sit your ass back down, because that happened.
We met on the Killing Fields. That's the big PVP server, but unofficially we call it the Meat Grinder. It's where you go to rack up kills and hoover up Moebits - the game's currency. It got the name because you throw yourself in over and over, adding to the pile of virtual corpses until you get a lucky streak. And then you log out with your hard-earned cash before you get shanked by some smart-ass griefer or a pro who's been playing since open beta. It's mad, it's wild, and it's a lot more fun than Vegas.
So there I was, about to get my ass handed to me by a thirty-five year old man from Kentucky. And then this blur of white and red flashes past, and the brick shithouse he's picked for an avatar is lying at my feet. I must have stood there for like five seconds, looking like the stupidest motherfucker in the room. A miracle nobody saw me and ganked me. Then I turn around and see this thing that looks like it walked out of a bad anime. Skinny, short black hair, fox mask, massive fuckoff katana that would break a real person's wrist.
We stare at each other for ten seconds.
Then she speaks, and she spoke English so well it was hard to tell she was Japanese.
"Need some help?"
The best response I could manage was "Er, sure."
"Great! I'm Asuka, by the way!"
And then she taught me how to pop a guy in the head from ten yards off. It was magic.
Asuka Banjo. Kicked out of her parents' house because she punched a teacher. Wound up inheriting a fortune from her Yakuza uncle, who didn't give a shit. Crazy, I know. But she'd taken to Moebius like a frog eats bugs, and had been constantly pushing herself to get top scores in everything. This wasn't a game to her, this was her life. Mostly because she paid her rent with her in-game earnings. But she'd needed a protégée, someone she could teach her crazy pro league ways to.
She picked me.
I learned quick. I ditched the gaudy patchwork of gear I'd accumulated and went straight sci-fi. Badass black robes over space metal that let me shrug off what used to one-shot kill me. I specialised in plasma weapons - kept the pistols, but had a backup sabre just in case, and also a small hand cannon for when I wanted to get mean. I learned to overcome the lag and my own rig, which I rapidly discovered was piss-poor for pro play.
It wasn't long before I was hitting the higher levels of the scoreboard in raids, races, duels... you name it. And as I got good, I got to know Asuka. We just... clicked, you know? She was a thrill-seeker, but kinda lonely. She needed to share her love of the game with someone. And I wanted to learn, to be a better player and to see everything this fucked-up digital universe had to barf up at me. She taught me all she knew, and I gave her the friend she was looking for. A good arrangement.
I remember my longest streak in the Meat Grinder. Forty-five kills. I wasn't even mad when somebody sniped me from behind a distant ridge. The monetary loss was the equivalent of putting quarters in a jukebox by that point.
The day after I'd moved to college, we'd sat down at one of the few relaxed servers the game had to offer. We threw some Moebits at some virtual drinks - you can't get drunk for real, but enough in-game booze applies a debuff that makes your balance go funny and your vision blur. So a lot like the real thing. We sat at the bartop and drank and joked, just having a good time.
Then Asuka started crying.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
She told me everything. Her parents had disowned her when they found out she'd moved in with her uncle. They didn't even tell her when her grandma died of pancreatic cancer a year ago. Nobody even looked at her at the reformatory school because she dyed her hair and had a lip piercing. One day, she'd walked home and somebody had scrawled GAIJIN on the garage door. She'd basically thrown herself into Moebius to escape a world that kept kicking her down and didn't give her a chance.
She'd told me most of this before. But not all of it.
"You're the only person who hasn't pushed me away," she'd said between sobs. And I suddenly found myself faced with a decision. A decision that could either make this crazy virtual double-life mean something, or burn it all down and piss on the ashes. My vision was a little foggy thanks to the alcohol debuff, but I was so cold sober at that moment you could have chilled wine on me.
I put my glass down and took her hand. She looked at me, and her avatar had the most beautiful brown eyes. I would learn later that her real-life eyes were that very same colour.
"I don't care," I told her. "I think you're amazing and I don't care."
Not my best line. But it got me my first kiss, so I guess it went well.
---
We met the others later. Toby, from the UK - a comedy streamer who was hoping to make it big. Kind of cuckoo, but a real laugh and our best sniper. Kwame, from Cape Town - he actually had a job in the game, as a supply courier. A real tech nerd who knew the game's inner workings better than anyone. Then Patrick 'The Hammer' from Canada, who couldn't get out of his house due to a crippling back injury. He'd been living on welfare until he found Moebius, and was a hell of a tank. Get between Hammer and some rare loot, and your ragdoll would sail off into the skybox.
And lastly, Jimmy from Boston. I'll get to Jimmy later.
The guild just formed naturally as we partnered up and took down bosses and challenges. Our dynamics quickly came about - Asuka was the most experienced, but thanks to her training I got used to calling the shots. Toby joked and made stupid noises, Kwame fixed our gear if it broke, Hammer punched things. It wasn't long before we started picking names for ourselves to make us feel more like a guild.
Wolf. That was me. I even bought a wolf mask to make it stick. Asuka was Fox, obviously. Pat got Doberman, because he could stick to an enemy and never let go. Kwame was Wild Dog, which was ironic because he barely got angry. I actually did ask if that was racist, but he told me he loved watching the African hunting dogs on nature programs, so I dropped it. Toby got Hyena because he never stopped laughing, and Jimmy was Jackal.
That was us. The Pack. We'd jump from server to server, looking for the biggest thrills. Raiding ships on Mutiny Bay, taking down monsters in the City of Giants, plunging down the Abyss Valley with naught but wingsuits we got at the last minute. Between us, we racked up enough Moebits to make us millionares and enough gear that we had to buy a warehouse for it. One of us was on the top ten on a scoreboard somewhere at any given time. It got the point where I quit my shitty office job because no amount of raises they could give me could top what I was making in this game.
We had it made. We were invincible.
---
But as patch after patch went by, the thrills ran out. We beat every boss, won every race, drank every drink. And there was nothing we could do that we hadn't already done, unless it was to defend our titles. Boredom was settling in. We needed something new, something harsh, something to bring the old spark back.
We started with griefing. Mostly, we just targeted the big players. The land barons, the capitalists, the exploiters - dickheads who held their power above the newbies and actively made their lives miserable. Our efforts were focused on undermining their imaginary thrones and forcing them to quit in childish rage. Think of us as a digital Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, except without the shitty clothes because this isn't the middle ages.
The highlight of our career was Captain Prendergast, trade baron and general dickweed, who was trying to monopolize all the trade routes in the space zone. But the stupid fucker kept all of his ill-gotten wealth in the one ship and on his one account. We swapped out his rum barrels with nitroglycerin and watched as his capital ship, and all his earnings over five years, went up in smoke. He screamed like a baby for five minutes, then logged out and erased his account, leaving the other players to scoop up his leavings.
The highlight of our career was Captain Prendergast, trade baron and general dickweed, who was trying to monopolize all the trade routes in the space zone. But the stupid fucker kept all of his ill-gotten wealth in the one ship and on his one account. We swapped out his rum barrels with nitroglycerin and watched as his capital ship, and all his earnings over five years, went up in smoke. He screamed like a baby for five minutes, then logged out and erased his account, leaving the other players to scoop up his leavings.
Still makes me laugh.
But that didn't hold us for long. Like millenials binging on their phones, we were overstimulated. We demanded new experiences, something that the servers couldn't give us anymore. We had to look elsewhere for our entertainment.
This is where I have to stop the story to explain shit to you.
See, you can buy in-game stuff with Moebits. But it's also a cryptocurrency in that you can buy real world things. One of the first things the Pack did, once we hit our first million, was buy top-of-the-line rigs for everybody so we didn't have to put up with shitty gloves anymore. Sensory bodysuits, omnidirectional rollers, full-face visors, a special motion-simulating seat for Pat. Nothing tops being able to feel the cool breeze of Mutiny Bay's ocean, or smell the iron and earth of the Killing Fields for real.
Asuka and I made love on that first night. It was weird, but fun.
But here's the thing. Cryptocurrency inherently has no value until you assign one to it. For most of the big, corporate-run servers, it's fixed to match the value of our good, noble American Dollar. But user servers aren't bound by the same rules unless a mod or bot's regulating it. Some places try to impose their own currency values without accounting for exchange rates. Others, like the asshole land barons, jack up the prices to make what you have worthless. And there's some places where a single Moebit can net you a factory-fresh Ferrari.
So it wasn't long before we began to realize what we could get. And where to get it.
A lot of the user servers aren't properly monitored. The game's developers pretty much expected their own filters to remove the actual rule-breaking stuff, and for the most part it did. But there were easy ways to get around that, like proxies. So jungle_world_099 looked innocuous on the outside, but might actually be where you could gamble away your savings, get cyber-laid or fight to the death in cage matches. Immoral, but not exactly illegal.
So that's where we started - drinking, smoking and fighting. Pat used to get his character shitfaced, then hit the cage matches to see how many he could take out before he keeled over. Asuka and I would get high on fantasy weed, then bang about five people between us. Kwame got into a street race once and lost about ten thousand bits when he crashed straight into a wall - stupid, but fucking funny. Dunno what Jimmy got up to, but he used to disappear for hours and was rather cagey, so he probably had a fetish he was satisfying somewhere.
Then one day, Pat called us all up on voice chat to tell us he'd just bought four pounds of weed.
The crazy thing is, he didn't think it would work. He'd just chucked about a hundred bits at the shady-looking dealer, thinking it was a joke. But then it turned up at his doorstep, signed for and approved, and he had to slap himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
We realized at once what was going on. Purchases made with Moebits didn't go through security checks, due to it being a fake currency with poorer regulation than an Alabama truck stop. What's more, it was piss-easy to fake the official liscence needed to make yourself a seller or trade stop. And as long as you had that, the system had no reason to assume you were selling anything that wasn't official merch. It might have been better-controlled on the corporate servers, as far as we knew, but on the user-made places, it was open season.
It started simple. Weed, booze, that sort of thing. But the slope was a slippery one. It grew into modded weapons that were impossible to obtain, too good for any player. That evolved into buying stims - packets of cheat software, the equivalent of steroids. When stims weren't enough, we bought physical cheat cartridges you could plug into your rig at any time and turn into a god. Then it got wilder, more illicit and bordering on actual illegality - bars of real gold, actually hardcore drugs. One of Asuka's birthday presents for me was a hooker carrying imported Japanese moonshine and a vaping pipe.
She had a weird idea of what constituted presents, okay? Don't judge.
It wasn't long before we started dealing the stuff ourself. We'd accumulated so much bank that it was easy to do. Kwame handled a lot of the expenses, being an accountant in real life. We simply had to provide the outlet and shipping, wherever it was digital or physical. Sometimes we had to escort armoured trucks with the goods through the dodgy parts of a server, like it was a fucking heist movie or something. There were firefights over this stuff - there were no levels like in an MMO, so any godlike gear attracted bandits like a carcass attracted flies.
At any one time, I had like fifty packets of drugs, booze and stim packs in my room. But I didn't care. Having to step over questionably-legal goods to take a piss in the night was worth it. I was rolling in fictional cash, and a mere drop of it could buy me three times what I had on some places.
Once again, we thought ourselves invincible.
A lot of the user servers aren't properly monitored. The game's developers pretty much expected their own filters to remove the actual rule-breaking stuff, and for the most part it did. But there were easy ways to get around that, like proxies. So jungle_world_099 looked innocuous on the outside, but might actually be where you could gamble away your savings, get cyber-laid or fight to the death in cage matches. Immoral, but not exactly illegal.
So that's where we started - drinking, smoking and fighting. Pat used to get his character shitfaced, then hit the cage matches to see how many he could take out before he keeled over. Asuka and I would get high on fantasy weed, then bang about five people between us. Kwame got into a street race once and lost about ten thousand bits when he crashed straight into a wall - stupid, but fucking funny. Dunno what Jimmy got up to, but he used to disappear for hours and was rather cagey, so he probably had a fetish he was satisfying somewhere.
Then one day, Pat called us all up on voice chat to tell us he'd just bought four pounds of weed.
The crazy thing is, he didn't think it would work. He'd just chucked about a hundred bits at the shady-looking dealer, thinking it was a joke. But then it turned up at his doorstep, signed for and approved, and he had to slap himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
We realized at once what was going on. Purchases made with Moebits didn't go through security checks, due to it being a fake currency with poorer regulation than an Alabama truck stop. What's more, it was piss-easy to fake the official liscence needed to make yourself a seller or trade stop. And as long as you had that, the system had no reason to assume you were selling anything that wasn't official merch. It might have been better-controlled on the corporate servers, as far as we knew, but on the user-made places, it was open season.
It started simple. Weed, booze, that sort of thing. But the slope was a slippery one. It grew into modded weapons that were impossible to obtain, too good for any player. That evolved into buying stims - packets of cheat software, the equivalent of steroids. When stims weren't enough, we bought physical cheat cartridges you could plug into your rig at any time and turn into a god. Then it got wilder, more illicit and bordering on actual illegality - bars of real gold, actually hardcore drugs. One of Asuka's birthday presents for me was a hooker carrying imported Japanese moonshine and a vaping pipe.
She had a weird idea of what constituted presents, okay? Don't judge.
It wasn't long before we started dealing the stuff ourself. We'd accumulated so much bank that it was easy to do. Kwame handled a lot of the expenses, being an accountant in real life. We simply had to provide the outlet and shipping, wherever it was digital or physical. Sometimes we had to escort armoured trucks with the goods through the dodgy parts of a server, like it was a fucking heist movie or something. There were firefights over this stuff - there were no levels like in an MMO, so any godlike gear attracted bandits like a carcass attracted flies.
At any one time, I had like fifty packets of drugs, booze and stim packs in my room. But I didn't care. Having to step over questionably-legal goods to take a piss in the night was worth it. I was rolling in fictional cash, and a mere drop of it could buy me three times what I had on some places.
Once again, we thought ourselves invincible.
---
Now I need to explain about Jimmy.
He'd been there from the first. But he never really fit in. He was kinda nervous and jumpy, and was more of a hanger-on than anything. Think of the short, scrawny kid who tries to fit in with the jocks at school, and you got the picture. I got the sense he was always second-guessing what we did, but didn't want to look like the complainer. He was a good enough player - mostly did explosives and demolitions. But he never did things on his own initiative.
So when he didn't turn up on the evening we were supposed to escort three trucks of hacked-in endgame weapons, I wrote it off. He was probably busy elsewhere, maybe on one of the official servers. He was easily amused by that kiddy shit. Or satisfying whatever weird fetish he had down in the sticks.
We never made it to the drop-off point. The moderators swooped down on us like wasps before we were halfway.
Videogame tasers hurt just as much as real life ones, by the way.
It took all of five minutes for them to tag our accounts with restrictions. Banned from mature servers, banned from purchasing real items, banned from drinking or smoking or sex. The next thing we knew, they'd kicked us back to the starting world. When we checked our inventories, we found out they'd stripped us. Our funds were a third of what they'd been, and most of our gear was gone. It was like the clock had been turned back. We'd lost almost everything.
We were sitting there, dumbfounded, when Jimmy turned up. And in a voice that was cracked with emotion, he told the whole story.
Now I need to explain about Jimmy.
He'd been there from the first. But he never really fit in. He was kinda nervous and jumpy, and was more of a hanger-on than anything. Think of the short, scrawny kid who tries to fit in with the jocks at school, and you got the picture. I got the sense he was always second-guessing what we did, but didn't want to look like the complainer. He was a good enough player - mostly did explosives and demolitions. But he never did things on his own initiative.
So when he didn't turn up on the evening we were supposed to escort three trucks of hacked-in endgame weapons, I wrote it off. He was probably busy elsewhere, maybe on one of the official servers. He was easily amused by that kiddy shit. Or satisfying whatever weird fetish he had down in the sticks.
We never made it to the drop-off point. The moderators swooped down on us like wasps before we were halfway.
Videogame tasers hurt just as much as real life ones, by the way.
It took all of five minutes for them to tag our accounts with restrictions. Banned from mature servers, banned from purchasing real items, banned from drinking or smoking or sex. The next thing we knew, they'd kicked us back to the starting world. When we checked our inventories, we found out they'd stripped us. Our funds were a third of what they'd been, and most of our gear was gone. It was like the clock had been turned back. We'd lost almost everything.
We were sitting there, dumbfounded, when Jimmy turned up. And in a voice that was cracked with emotion, he told the whole story.
His dad had been arrested. One of our contacts had traced him via his Creds and found out he was the son of a big business mandate who commited insurance fraud on the side. That user had been screwed over by his company, and was just dying for a little petty revenge. So he dug up as much dirt as he could and sent it off to the nearest department of law.
The first anyone knew about it was when the cops kicked the door down. They'd left Jimmy alone, and it was a miracle they didn't search his rig, but the kid got scared. Real scared. And he was terrified someone might do the same to him and take away everything he had. So he turned to the mods, and told them everything. All the stuff we were dealing, and where to go. And they set up the ambush on his directions.
We chewed him out. But he wouldn't budge. He stood there whilst we ripped into him like idiots for ruining everything we'd had going for us. We said the dumbest shit - it was just a game, we were only doing it for fun, what the fuck did he think he was? But he stood there and took it.
Then he hit back.
"This isn't fun, guys. Fun is skydiving off Zenith Tower with nothing but a grappling hook. And a game? You stupid fucks, my dad got arrested! You think that's fun?! I nearly lost everything in the real world, and you still want to treat this like it's the arcades?! Like none of this has any consequence?! What if they came knocking on your door over that Japanese booze, Wolf?! Or the weed, Patrick?!"
There was silence for a long, awful moment.
"I'm deleting my account. This isn't a game anymore. I can't let this shit ruin my life, my chance for a job. There was a point where we should have stopped and we didn't. So I'm stopping now."
Then he logged off.
---
Wild Dog and Hyena didn't delete their accounts. They had too much stake in there. But they dropped out, all the same. Kwame didn't want his records to show all the illegal shit we'd been doing, and Toby was afraid he'd lose his sponsorship if this leaked out. So in the end it was just me, Doberman and Fox. The Pack was cut in half.
The awful thing was, Jimmy was right. We should have stopped, preferably before we even touched the drugs and the stims. But we were so blinded by opportunity that we didn't see the cliff edge until we were halfway down. But above all things, I blamed myself for it all happening. As the leader, I should have drawn a line in the sand and said 'no', but I got suckered in. I had no excuse for letting things get that bad. I felt like all of this was on me, that I'd failed as a guild leader.
I hated myself for days and days. I didn't come out of the room for up to a week, so the landlord came knocking to see if I was alright. When I opened the door and he saw how bad I looked, he barged straight in and brewed me a coffee to calm my nerves. When I told him what had happened, he shook his head and smiled sadly. I thought for an awful moment he was gonna call the real cops, but he didn't. He understood.
And then he told me something I still remember to this day.
"Everyone fucks up. Look at me. I fucked up in college and now I'm letting out flats to junkies. But if you don't learn shit from this, then you're gonna keep making the same mistakes. You got burned hard, but that should have taught you not to stick your hand in the fire. It ain't the failing that's the important part - it's what you do after."
Then I paid him his rent and he left.
---
It was almost two months before any of us logged back in. By that time, the bans had been lifted. But we were serious about this now. Shit needed sorting. So we all sat down at a pub in Mutiny Bay one afternoon and talked it out.
Asuka blamed herself for not controlling me. I blamed myself for not being a good leader. Pat blamed himself for getting the idea to do the dealing in the first place. In the end, we realized no single person was at fault - the entire thing was a huge cockup caused by everyone. I remembered the landlord's advice, and decided we had to set some hard ground rules this time. We were lucky to get away with mere restrictions and deleted gear - if this happened again, a permenant ban was all too likely.
We could still do the running and the street races and all that. That was still fun. And there was no way we could stop sticking it to the big guys. But no more stimming. No more modded weapons or illegal goods. And nothing that affected the real world or anyone else in real life. Anyone who did that, they were out. That was our new creed, and we managed to boil it down to three words. "Keep it Virtual." Has a nice ring to it, right?
So that's us now. The Pack. Wolf, Fox and Coyote - Pat changed his name because Doberman was too much of a mouthful. We're only three now, and we're not as big as we once were, but it's a clean start. And some people still point us out and go "Hey, look, it's the Pack! Remember when they trolled Prendergast?". Which is nice.
You can be anyone in Moebius. But don't fuck with reality whilst you're at it.
Life lesson, kids.
The first anyone knew about it was when the cops kicked the door down. They'd left Jimmy alone, and it was a miracle they didn't search his rig, but the kid got scared. Real scared. And he was terrified someone might do the same to him and take away everything he had. So he turned to the mods, and told them everything. All the stuff we were dealing, and where to go. And they set up the ambush on his directions.
We chewed him out. But he wouldn't budge. He stood there whilst we ripped into him like idiots for ruining everything we'd had going for us. We said the dumbest shit - it was just a game, we were only doing it for fun, what the fuck did he think he was? But he stood there and took it.
Then he hit back.
"This isn't fun, guys. Fun is skydiving off Zenith Tower with nothing but a grappling hook. And a game? You stupid fucks, my dad got arrested! You think that's fun?! I nearly lost everything in the real world, and you still want to treat this like it's the arcades?! Like none of this has any consequence?! What if they came knocking on your door over that Japanese booze, Wolf?! Or the weed, Patrick?!"
There was silence for a long, awful moment.
"I'm deleting my account. This isn't a game anymore. I can't let this shit ruin my life, my chance for a job. There was a point where we should have stopped and we didn't. So I'm stopping now."
Then he logged off.
---
Wild Dog and Hyena didn't delete their accounts. They had too much stake in there. But they dropped out, all the same. Kwame didn't want his records to show all the illegal shit we'd been doing, and Toby was afraid he'd lose his sponsorship if this leaked out. So in the end it was just me, Doberman and Fox. The Pack was cut in half.
The awful thing was, Jimmy was right. We should have stopped, preferably before we even touched the drugs and the stims. But we were so blinded by opportunity that we didn't see the cliff edge until we were halfway down. But above all things, I blamed myself for it all happening. As the leader, I should have drawn a line in the sand and said 'no', but I got suckered in. I had no excuse for letting things get that bad. I felt like all of this was on me, that I'd failed as a guild leader.
I hated myself for days and days. I didn't come out of the room for up to a week, so the landlord came knocking to see if I was alright. When I opened the door and he saw how bad I looked, he barged straight in and brewed me a coffee to calm my nerves. When I told him what had happened, he shook his head and smiled sadly. I thought for an awful moment he was gonna call the real cops, but he didn't. He understood.
And then he told me something I still remember to this day.
"Everyone fucks up. Look at me. I fucked up in college and now I'm letting out flats to junkies. But if you don't learn shit from this, then you're gonna keep making the same mistakes. You got burned hard, but that should have taught you not to stick your hand in the fire. It ain't the failing that's the important part - it's what you do after."
Then I paid him his rent and he left.
---
It was almost two months before any of us logged back in. By that time, the bans had been lifted. But we were serious about this now. Shit needed sorting. So we all sat down at a pub in Mutiny Bay one afternoon and talked it out.
Asuka blamed herself for not controlling me. I blamed myself for not being a good leader. Pat blamed himself for getting the idea to do the dealing in the first place. In the end, we realized no single person was at fault - the entire thing was a huge cockup caused by everyone. I remembered the landlord's advice, and decided we had to set some hard ground rules this time. We were lucky to get away with mere restrictions and deleted gear - if this happened again, a permenant ban was all too likely.
We could still do the running and the street races and all that. That was still fun. And there was no way we could stop sticking it to the big guys. But no more stimming. No more modded weapons or illegal goods. And nothing that affected the real world or anyone else in real life. Anyone who did that, they were out. That was our new creed, and we managed to boil it down to three words. "Keep it Virtual." Has a nice ring to it, right?
So that's us now. The Pack. Wolf, Fox and Coyote - Pat changed his name because Doberman was too much of a mouthful. We're only three now, and we're not as big as we once were, but it's a clean start. And some people still point us out and go "Hey, look, it's the Pack! Remember when they trolled Prendergast?". Which is nice.
You can be anyone in Moebius. But don't fuck with reality whilst you're at it.
Life lesson, kids.
A lot of these stories could be avoided if more people watched Goodfellas.
ReplyDelete