Nobody rushed to chase us. The Ravager was banished, and it couldn’t be killed—or so I thought. Harnathea continued to move, and I kept sitting in clouds of soot and smoke, so I didn’t see right away that something strange was happening…
And then it was too late. Destroying Plague Immortality stopped working for some reason. I died.
You are dead.
Remaining time to respawn 9… 8… 7…
I felt rising panic, my thoughts raced. NergaVs priest canceled out my protection from the Destroying Plague and the Ravager aura killed me. Any moment now, the preventers will arrive and…
But I respawned and sighed in relief. I looked around, recognized Kharinza. A quick glance showed me that I’d lost nothing on death except experience; all my equipment and the contents of my bag were still there. I’d lost my engineer disguise and Cloak Essence buff.
Familiar jungle surrounded me, but… Behemoth’s temple was gone! Not a trace remained of Gyula’s structure, just the ruins of the Departed in the same state I once found them in when I swam here from the shore near Tristad.
I needed to figure out where the temple had gone. I walked around the ruins and my jaw dropped further. No signs of the fort; no buildings, no street.
I decided to take off and look around. My ability to summon the dead Storm had cooled down when I revived, but I couldn’t find her in my list of mounts. The mechostrich was gone too.
I climbed up a tall tree, scraping my skin on the bark. The virgin jungle opened up before me. Quiet and calm. The fact that there was no life on Kharinza wasn’t news, but even the ever-chirping cicadas were silent.
The strangeness didn’t stop there. A few parts of the interface had disappeared, including the date and time. A quick glance at my profile showed me no sign of the abilities given by Behemoth or the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague. All that remained were the class skills and the ones I’d learned myself: Unarmed Combat, Resilience, Ghastly Howl, Depths Teleportation…
I activated the last one and couldn’t find Kharinza, Kinema, Darant or Shak in the list for teleportation. Vermillion, Nivelle and the Lake District were gone too. The list of jump points was as scant as it had been half a year ago when I first got the ability: Gloomwood, the Mire, Tristad, the Olton Quarries…
The chat was empty. There was no clan tab. My friends list was clear. I tried to message Crawler, Infect, Bomber and Gvula, but the system said the same for each: No player with that name registered.
And the last straw—the Quit button was gone. Feeling my heart begin to race in real life, I scoured the altered menu, thinking that the button must be hidden somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.
There wasn’t even a link to tech support.
I walked all across Kharinza, but saw nothing. The Montosaurus was gone, or maybe had never even been here. “Here’ meaning this version of the island.
On the beach, I finally accepted that I wouldn’t find anyone there. Even the level-one crabs that were always scuttling across the sands were gone.
I don’t know how much time I wasted wandering around. The sun didn’t move in the cloudless sky, and I had no watch. I felt like no more than a day could have passed.
The only inhabited place I could teleport to was Tristad. I decided to try my luck there.
The familiar sandbox town greeted me with empty streets and lifeless buildings. The Bubbling Flagon was still there, and even the bench where Eve and I used to while away the hours. But the city was empty. No NPCs, no players.
The only difference between this and the Tristad I knew was that there was no temple to Nergal here. The spot it should have occupied was just an extension of the central square. Deserted, like the rest of the city.
Once I’d walked the length and breadth of it, a rising panic began to eat me inside. Then my stomach started to rumble and something literally rose in my throat. I threw up! In the game!
Right after that, I felt a terrible thirst. A strange kind of system message swam before me, uncharacteristic of Dis. Something like a window from an ancient computer program, black with flashing red text: You are dying of thirst!
-50% endurance.
-1% health every 5 minutes.
My throat felt like sandpaper and I couldn’t think of anything but water. Just in time, I remembered where to find Tristad’s well.
It was where it should be, a couple of blocks from the tavern. And the bucket was still there too. I filled it up and drank for a long time, greedily, paying no attention to the pain in my teeth from the icy water. Once my thirst was quenched, I felt hunger, but I could deal with that; it didn’t take away my health, just lowered my strength, endurance and regeneration speed. The debuffs told me where to focus my thoughts.
I sat down with my back to the well and tried to figure out what was happening.
When Disgardium was being created, there were many arguments among its founding fathers about how much realism should be added. Hunger and thirst were among the most serious points of contention, because including one in the game meant you had to include the other. If there was an input, you had to have an output. Not only did some of the developers vehemently vote against this, but so did the game community. Influences asked “why create a magical virtual world and make it just like the real one, with all the shit involved?’ In the end, they won; eating and drinking became optional in the game, and even if you did eat or drink something, you didn’t have to use
