Free The Lag (The Game Master: Book #1) by Alex Bobl

trying to fleece him like a Moscow cabbie!
    He decided to give it another try and opened his Skype Messenger. It sort of worked, although his contacts' online status icons kept changing color from green to yellow: fading completely, then turning to green again.
    Yanna craned her neck, trying to see his manipulations with the book. "Where'd you get Skype from? I thought Gryad didn't have it?"
    "It doesn't. I do. But at the moment, it doesn't make much sense. Look at the icons. It's probably glitchy because of the Storm. It was weird, wasn't it? Or maybe it's the glitches that caused the Storm. Relax. Once everything's back up, I'll send you the money."
    The girl tried to look calm. Still, her lip-biting and sleeve-tagging betrayed her feelings. "Hope we're not stuck here for too long," she said.
    Her voice seemed to come from afar. Attila's ears were blocked — also as a result of the Storm, he guessed. His brain felt like jelly. And that was here, in the hole — outside on the surface his head might have already burst like a watermelon.
    Attila pressed his hands to his ears, then let go sharply. With a painful pop, his eardrums twitched. He gulped. That didn't work, either.
    "I shouldn't go out if I were you," he said. "Have you been in Gryad long? How many Storms have you seen?"
    "That's none of your business."
    So much for the conversation starter. He shrugged. Himself he only remembered one Storm — and that was ages ago when he'd first come here. Storms were part of the Dead Canyon's plotline. They came from the Citadel. According to the storybook, they came to our reality via the Great Portal opened by the Conclave of the Seven Wizards in order to combat the dark hordes they'd inadvertently let out of the Citadel's catacombs.
    The Storms were capable of affecting the very fabric of reality, creating new monsters and even changing the world's geography by occasionally closing old locations and opening up new ones. In theory, that was the developers' way of explaining away certain changes they'd introduced like the discovery of new locations or the arrival of new mobs and aberrations without disturbing the world's balance.
    All Storms had one thing in common: the powerful surge of magic anomalies killed all players who had weak magic defenses and failed to take cover underground.
    Attila made another attempt to get to know her. "Where are you from? I'm from Moscow in case you're interested. You?"
    "St.P," she said reluctantly.
    "You studying?" he asked, convinced she was still at high school.
    "Yeah," she said. "I read medicine. Why?"
    He cast her an incredulous look. Did she really? Then again, what difference did it make? Not to a cripple like himself, anyway. This player could be male for all he knew.
    "Why were the legionnaires after you?" she asked.
    "I was trying to sell some software. It was a trap."
    "What kind of software?"
    He slapped his pocket. "This one here. It's a flying thingy that sends a picture to your Book — or to your goggles. I made it."
    "Yeah, right. Pull the other one."
    What was she like! He felt like giving her a slap. "I made it," he said, trying to stay calm. "You don't have to believe me if you don't want to."
    "You wanna say you're a game master? A cheat master, a programmer? A hacker, to be precise. Is that it?"
    "Sort of."
    "Then you should know, Mr. Game Master, how come the portal stations don't work. What's going on, for crissakes?"
    He shrugged again. "No idea. The whole game is based on the principle of portal stations. They just can't fail. It's like... like gravity stopped working on Earth, you understand? The stations are firmly rooted in the world's laws. You have any idea of the kind of money involved? They just can't afford a glitch like that. They would lose their partners."
    "Could that mean there're serious problems with the game?"
    He shook his head. He didn't like the way this conversation was going. "I shouldn't jump to conclusions."
    "Why not?" she stomped her foot.