Green Sky Days

	Rachel rezzed into Stopwatch Hearts, but not in a future-tech citadel like she'd still half expected. Her boots landed in sparse grass, the land was clear halfway to the horizon, and the sky was a pale blue, striped by concentric clouds circling some tower visible dozens of kilometers to the east. The vegetation was trepid, but the scent in the air was all earth and plants.
	However, her in-game body was young and athletic, with exactly the color and shape she'd chosen, and while looking around she found herself reflexively standing in the Hoverjock idle animation. She'd gone in classless, so she'd be taking animations randomly from various classes depending on her build, but her build was heavy on mobility, so Hoverjock should indeed feature prominently.
	Her presence faced no interference, no distortion or disruption, and yet the world around her was entirely wrong. She summoned the map with a gesture. Before jacking in, she'd used GM commands to reveal all the maps, and sure enough, she was at the origin in the Junkyard… except the little freshly-revealed ring around her, which was all dull green.
	She summoned the system menu in midair, and checked the server time. She'd used up most of her 5 minutes gawking. If she didn't check in soon, then they'd jack her out and reevaluate. That would hurt. She reached up to the back of her head, deliberately, ignoring the long thick hair of her avatar, and tried to jack out like she had a thousand times before. It wouldn't hurt if she did it, "can't tickle yourself". But of course it didn't work. If players could just jack out, then they wouldn't have people around the world trapped in the game. She couldn't even feel the bristles of her close-cropped real hair.
	The first communication she tried was submitting it as a bug report. "Made it fine, investigating, K?" was one of those bug reports they'd bitch about, if the game had been functioning, but now the shittiness of it was somehow comforting. But not a single bug report had come in since the patch that fucked everything, so it was unlikely to work.
	She also had all eight of the GM channels that connected to workstations in the real world, including the "inner circle" channel, the channel normally reserved for the company president's use, the emergency backup channel in case one of the others goes down, and the backup emergency backup channel. One by one, she focused on a channel, and thought the same words at it: «I made it in fine. I'm investigating. Copy?»
	One by one, no immediate reply. Her heart was sinking. A handful of her coworkers were crowded around three workstations in the Horizontech main office, waiting for her to phone home.
	Time for the last resort. Her inventory proper wasn't full, but her bags were. The first expansion had added Unique 21-slot weightless bags; both expansion factions had quest chains to get 4 each, but they were opposed, it wasn't possible to do both. The bags were character-bound, it wasn't possible to trade them. And it wasn't possible to repeat the quests, even if the bags hadn't been Unique. So high-level players had 4 21-slot bags and 4 20-slot bags, all weightless. However, before jacking in, she'd used GM commands to give herself all 8 21-slot bags, and the whole team had helped her with her loadout. In her Haversack Of The Scarlet Spire she had a full stack of 64 Scarlet Fireworks. With a gesture she summoned her inventory and picked them out, grabbed 16 from the stack, and dropped 15 of them in a pile on the ground. The last she activated on that spot.
	Unlike real fireworks, fireworks in the game would always fly up with a bit of random angle, and detonate safely overhead. This was how players launched salvos of fireworks, and how she'd launched fireworks for a few holiday events. But like real fireworks, these took off in a mad scatter of directions, two of them skittering off her armor's deflectors, one of those close enough to her face it would've blinded her if she hadn't had gobs of blinding resistance from Tier VI armor. Probably would've seared a nasty scar if this had been real.
	It wasn't real, but it wasn't how the game works, either. She sat down and thought, processing the experience, as 16 fireworks burst into scarlet lightshows. 4 of them were low enough to burst against the ground, but unlike reality, none of them started fires in the sparse grass. 1 of them was directly overhead.
	They should still show up on the Holiday Organizer, running on Allen's workstation. Rachel watched the sky.
	The graphics used a simplified radiosity model, where pre-baked environmental radiosity hulls counted, but nothing mobile, except mobile lights counted. It was hauntingly beautiful at night. The sky she saw was a simple color, the daystar a simple point source; what players were supposed to see when they looked up was the thick roiling cloud deck, backlit by the daystar and the sky's emissive blue, an interplay of light and dark with a tinge of color. Now, with the clouds warped, the sky was a flat blue with streaks of white circling that distant tower, and a golden pinprick for the daystar. From the master views outside the game, they couldn't even see the clouds anymore. But they could control the sky.
	Sure enough, it changed. The sky went a violent green, and the daystar a livid purple… but it stayed that way for a worrying time. Only about a second, but still. About a second off, then another second on, all told they flashed the sky 16 times.
	Rachel grinned madly. She would've shed a tear if the game had supported that. The flashes were supposed to be fast, but that could be dealt with.
	Communication with the real world. They weren't going to jack her out. She could call for a jack-out. She could, in a limited sense, report on her findings.
	She stood, and with a fresh spring in her step, she set out for that tower. She guessed that was player doing, which meant players were probably still alive in the game.

		★	★	★