Free Multiplayer by John C. Brewer

again, would be a cybertech’s paradise, though it also made him kind of sad. He and his family had really enjoyed their time here. Seeing it like this was sobering, even knowing it was from inside a game.
    They were about to cross the main street when Darxhan hissed in alarm and jumped back. Izaak instinctively followed him. “What do you got?” he asked nervously. The weirdness of this place was getting to him.
    “There,” said Darxhan, and pointed his weapon east along the road.
    Izaak looked and spied two vanguards coming along the road in their direction. So Alanya wasn’t deserted after all. They came to within a hundred yards or so, then turned and went the other way.
    “You take the one on the right,” said Darxhan, readying his chain gun. “I’ll get –”
    “Are you crazy!” snapped Izaak. “Give it a minute. See what they do.”
    After five minutes the pattern was clear. They were sentries.
    “What clan?” asked Darxhan, when they were completing their circuit for the third time.
    Izaak sized them up through the scope of his sniper rifle. “Not Reavers. No markings.” Darxhan pointed out that they had no markings either.
    “Let’s take ‘em down,” said Darxhan.
    Izaak looked over to see the big merc raising his auto cannon. So Deion, Hector thought. Always brute force. “Uh, Deion. Don’t you want to see what they’re guarding first? We take them out and the whole place will know we’re here.”
    Deion agreed, so, they waited until the sentries were out of sight, checked both ways, and stole quickly across.
    On the other side of the road, the flat coastal plain began to lift up. They could not see the ocean yet, but the dark fastness of the Ehmedek fortress now loomed high above them, cutting across the peninsula.
    And it was quiet. That’s when they noticed they’d left the thorks and scarobs behind. Maybe the guards had already taken them out. “We need to check over there,” said Izaak, aiming his weapon off to their left. “There’s a big guard tower down by the harbor. Inside the wall. In the old city.”
    They followed the road until it came to a crumbly medieval wall. There, they saw from a distance two more guards at a large, arched opening, but otherwise the wall was unguarded. Still, they both agreed the fact that there were any guards was odd. This whole area was an under-populated backwater in Omega Wars . What could they possibly be guarding and from whom? Maybe this was a base for whatever clan Mal-X belonged to, but that didn’t make sense with no slipgate around.
    Izaak and Darxhan scaled the wall in an unobtrusive place and found no clues on the other side. They followed the stone divider back through a rubble-strewn alley, but pulled up short when they reached the end.
    “What the…” whispered Izaak, looking around in shock. An exact duplicate of Alanya right down to the lively shops lining the alleyways! No rubble. No burned out vehicles. And characters everywhere.
    “No one is carrying any weapons?” Darxhan questioned.
    He was right. Stranger still, aside from a few mercs and vanguards, the rest, as best they could guess, were either smugglers or maybe empaths. No armor. No real tech to speak of. They seemed no more than townspeople going about their mundane, daily routines as if they lived here. A group of characters sat under an awning. Others tended stores. Like real life. It made no sense. But at least the sentries had a purpose: keeping thorks and scarobs out. But… why?
    Then Darxhan noticed something else was missing – VTTs. Virtual Transfer Terminals allowed players to buy drachmas – in-game money – and transfer information between Omega and the real world. VTTs were always present, and some of the first things to go into a reclaimed area, since both the virtual shop owners and MegaSoft made real money off them.
    “We need to open up a store,” said Darxhan.
    “But that doesn’t explain why there isn’t one already here,” Izaak