The Walls of Anamoor

“Hey Daniel, look!” Leon called from my right, sitting at the next workstation over. I glanced away from my screen and over to his one, where he was in the middle of duping an item or something. Another bug to write down.

I smiled, regardless of how bored I was inside. I was not interested in becoming QA for a game company. I’d heard how they were the lowest on the totem pole, how their work wasn’t the games all day lifestyle that people believed it to be.

Leon on the other hand, was keen as a bean. However keen beans were. I wasn’t an expert on the levels of enthusiasm a bean could reach.

“Gonna write a report for our gracious hosts?” I asked with a grin.

He shrugged. “It gets us extra points for our class, so I guess so. It’s a pretty simple bug to replicate.”

Class, that thing that I was failing. I’d entered the game development major with high hopes and loftier dreams. I wanted to make the perfect game, I wanted to be that rockstar art department lead who wowed everyone with his spot on direction and advice. The reality of building, and learning to build games had quickly stripped me of that enthusiasm, and all I was left with was a seat on a train I’d already paid for.

I turned back to my screen with a grunt in Leon’s direction as a form of both answer and conversation ender. I was feeling pretty tired now, having spent an entire mind-numbing day doing testing work for free.

That’s right, I was currently breaking a game over and over and over, then when I’d sufficiently broken something, I’d write a report about it. Our professor had contacts in a nearby game studio, and he’d thought it would be fully sick if we all got to go and try out their new game, helping with the closed beta. Pretty cool right?

From a certain standpoint, it was damned cool. I’d been frothing at the mouth for a good new MMO to come out, the market for them was saturated by the same shit with a different coat of paint. Game after game grasping desperately at the money bags dangling from WoW’s over-laden belt.

Then came Setaro, the next big thing. Like so many before it, everyone had dismissed their kickstarter. Everyone had shrugged when they hit their goal. We’d heard this story before, we knew they would enter development hell somewhere around the third year after their kickstarter. Poor design decisions would plague them, drive them into the ground until their corpse was eventually picked apart by their backers as they tried to desperately get their money back before there was none left.

Except, miraculously, that hadn’t happened. Now here I was, invited to do a day in the shoes of the QA team, who I assumed were off in the break room getting high and laughing at us for being utter chumps.

I let out a long slow breath as I stared blankly at my screen, where my current character stood rolling through idle animations. I figured, since they had put so much work into contextual idle animations, that I’d test them to see if they were jank. Two birds one stone, not working while I worked!

This character had been a bit of an experiment. She was average height for a woman, at least as far as I could tell within the game’s scale. Hips were wide, hair was blond and tied back in a harsh ponytail, but her chest was about as flat as I could make it. She was the game’s rogue class, wearing a skintight bodysuit with leather padding in realistic spots. Her shoes were just soft wrapped cloth, she wore fingerless gloves and her face was covered by a mask.

She looked, basically, like a guy. At least until you took off her mask and some of the armour. Then she was just a pretty girl with a flat chest and deceptively large hips. The big blue eyes should have been a giveaway, but somehow the eyes didn’t look completely feminine without the lips. I might have spent a little too much time making her while I “tested” the character creator.

The strangest part was that like everyone else in the class, I’d made my character to look sorta like myself. The blond hair was there, although significantly longer than my shaggy mop, the blue eyes were the same, although slightly bigger and with longer lashes. She had the same small but toned physique, a lot of muscle packed into a relatively small package. But that was the thing, I had the uh… package and she didn’t.

I groaned and rubbed at my eyes for a few moments. This was so fucking boring. When my eyes focused again, I found that I’d been staring straight into the eyes of the girl across from me. Victoria was a quiet, introverted and standoffish girl who was extremely good at drawing and painting. One of those people you knew was going to end up actually getting a job in the field she was aiming for.

Her big brown eyes blinked a few times over our monitors for a second before she frowned and pointedly went back to her work. Sorry Victoria. She was very much the kind of girl who didn’t deal well with the kind of attention that being one of five girls in a class of thirty got her. I felt for her, in a sympathetic sort of way. Some of the guys in our class were… well, using the word gross would be kind.

To my left, another of the girls in my class groaned and flopped forward, her forehead hitting the desktop with a dull thump. “What the hell am I meant to do now?” Joan complained, her voice high and petulant. “I can’t find any stupid bugs. Everyone’s already found the shit I find. I hate this.”

I laughed, and gave a rumbling hum of agreement. “It’s pretty dull, hey?”

“Why did I think this would be fun?” she asked, rising from her head-desk position to stare at me with wild eyes, her short ginger hair sticking out in all directions. “Why did I think this whole shit guzzling class would be fun?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I shrugged, helpless to fix the situation for either of us. “I’ve been looking to cross credit into another major, but… there isn’t much overlap for animation. It’s either film or this.”

“Yeah and film is like, hey would you like to have your life and soul ground into mortar to build this multi-million dollar cashgrab while being paid next to nothing and working sixteen hours a day?” she said, very angrily. Joan was also in a similar boat, except with rigging for animation rather than animation itself.

“I would definitely like to work in a job where the second question in any job interview isn’t, ‘Hey so how good are you at sleeping under your desk?’” I agreed, somewhat vigorously. Okay, a lot vigorously, you caught me. What were you going to do, make my life even more miserable than it currently was? I’d honestly be interested to see if that was possible.

Shuddering theatrically, Joan nodded with similar vigor, and suddenly we were both laughing and grinning like idiots. Huh, I hadn’t known Joan was cool like this. I generally only interacted with anyone in my class if I absolutely needed to. Well, except Leon. he was one of those rare geeky as hell extroverts, and he’d decided to adopt me as his pocket introvert.

Our class continued for another two mind numbing hours before we were finally released from our makeshift ring of hell. We all piled out of the game dev studio in a blind haze, stunned by the fact that the real world still existed outside.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to find our way home from the studio, which was way out on the edges of civilisation where rent was cheap. At least the drive back was nice though, a scenic pass through some high hills before we could get back to the city proper. You just had to not look down into the dizzying drop right next to the road.

We all piled into the bus, each of us worn out and looking forward to getting home. Even those who had enjoyed the experience were looking mighty worn out right now, and I found the first empty row and threw myself down into the window seat, Leon not far behind.

“Can’t wait to get home and play a game instead of just testing one,” he grumbled, his dark hair almost as dishevelled as Joan’s had been. “It was cool, don’t get me wrong… but it was way more work than I thought it would be.”

“They told us that QA was work during our first year dude, when they went and debunked all of our hopes and dreams,” I said somewhat irritably. Leon had a habit of forgetting pertinent information if it had been told to him more than a month prior.

“You’re so depressing to hang out with man,” he said, with an angry glare in my direction, which I saw through the window’s reflection.

I shrugged, my mood dropping somewhat. Like it always did when I was confronted with the realities of my life. “Sorry man, life is shit.”

“It will definitely stay shit if you just wallow in your own misery all the time,” he said, voice harsh before he turned away and pointedly stared down the aisle.

The bus finally began to move, and I resigned myself to a silent trip as the suddenly frigid atmosphere between myself and my friend continued to chill the air. Outside the bus, the weather was just as terrible, the first scattered droplets of a rainstorm hitting the bus from side on as the wind picked up.

Goodness, this place could get windy when a storm was coming in. The sheer walls of the gorge funnelling the air in and accelerating it to terrifying speeds. The distant boom of thunder had the hair on the back of my neck standing up and suddenly I was pressed even closer to the window, trying to get a look.

I was a strange guy, while other people might hate the rain, the wind and lightning, I loved it, revelled in it. Pretty much anything exciting got me going, adrenaline pumping through me as I temporarily forgot my apathetic depression in the face of nature. It was why I played so many action games, I just loved the frantic speed of it all. Well, action games and shit like snowboarding and bungee jumping.

I guess I was a bit of an adrenaline junkie, but it was more than that. When shit was getting real, my mind didn’t lock up like so many other people. Instead, it went into overdrive, pushing all else aside to analyse a situation and figure out what needed to be done.

There was one time when I was much younger, sixteen or so, with some friends down at the beach getting drunk around a bonfire. We’d set the bonfire up on this newly poured block of concrete. No idea what it was there for, but there was a fresh block of concrete on the beach.

Anyway, we’re all having fun, chilling out and drinking. All that good stuff, but then boom, suddenly the concrete fucking explodes, there’s burning shit raining down all over the place and searing hot concrete chunks are hitting us in the face. Everyone else is screaming and swearing their heads off, but I’m silent. I grab the bucket that someone had the foresight to bring and I bolt for the ocean.

Took a few trips to put that fire out, especially the parts that flew out into the dry grass, but it got done. No one figured out why the concrete exploded like that, none of us were particularly sciency, but yeah… I got a reputation after that as the guy you called when shit was going wrong.

“This wind is nuts,” Leon muttered, breaking the ice and silence to lean over and stare out the window with me. “Hope a slip doesn’t come down.”

“We’ll probably get through before any slips come down, the dirt will need time to soak before it gets mobile,” I told him thoughtfully, staring up at the cliffs in question. They had nets up to stop rocks from falling down on the road, and I could already see them shaking with the occasional impact.

Not a minute later, the bus shook violently, a gust of wind briefly lifting the cliff-side wheels completely off the ground. Holy shit, what kind of storm had winds this strong?

There were screams as the bus listed to the side, and I held my breath with eyes wide as it hung there, neither falling over nor landing upright. Leon’s knuckles were white as he gripped the handhold in front of him, breathing ragged and fearful.

Relief washed through me for a moment as I felt our center of gravity shift back and the bus began to right itself. A rush of wind hit us again, the bus shuddering violently under the impact, and suddenly we were tipping beyond the point of no return.

People flew in all directions as the bus ground jarringly against the road, but our shitty luck wasn’t done. For once, I felt actual fear as sudden weightlessness gripped my stomach in a vice.