see in the plaza, striking at them with clubs of ironwood and carved stone. Trolls? Rik thought, astonished. They look like it, anyway. Liveried—At least it looked like a livery they were wearing, something dark purple. But what the heck’s going on here? You can’t have a battle in Omnitopia City!
Nonetheless, somebody seemed to have forgotten to tell the trolls that. There were maybe five thousand of them in the plaza, scattered all over the place and bashing anybody they could catch. Things weren’t all going their way: here and there flashes of magelight from characters and players of all styles struck them down as Rik watched. The trolls were trapped in this world, too, as Rik could see from here that the Ring of Elich had shut itself away behind a secondary ring of impenetrable blue fire.
Then his head snapped around as, from not too far away, he heard the yell “MEDIIIIIIC!”
Rik’s eyes went wide, but he couldn’t help grinning. Even unprepared as he might have been for this particular scenario, dealing with that kind of shout was what Arnulf Manyfaced lived for. Hurriedly he whipped off his cloak, flipped it inside out so that the squared white cross and crossed swords showed clearly on his back. But what the heck am I going to say to the guys? They’re going to say I’m avoiding them. Well, never mind that now . . .
He plunged into the fray. All around him magical blasts of multicolored fire were shooting in every direction, kicking up paving stones, knocking plaster off walls on the buildings closest to the Ring, blowing out windows. Arnulf plunged through an insane melee of shrieking and cursing and the yells of men and women and beasts of every kind, dragons howling, somebody’s leashed hellhound yelping where somebody else had stepped on it. Arnulf paused only long enough to let a very large crowd of angry Gnarths muscle past him in pursuit of the trolls, their armor in shreds and their independent liveries indistinguishable from one another in the coating of city muck and blood they’d acquired during the beginning of the fight. Then he ran on again, trying to see where the shout had come from.
“Over here!”
He angled to the right, where a big hairy guy, some kind of drow or ogre at first guess, was waving at him past the body of a battle mammoth. Rik shook his head as he dropped to his knees beside the huge bulk: it took a lot of ergs or magic to bring one of these down, as most of them availed themselves of magial engineering as soon as they could afford it, buying themselves an augmentation of that already redoubtable hide.
“What happened?” Rik said, unfastening one of his simples bags and dropping it in front of him.
“Guy caught a blast of trollfire right in the chops,” said the ogre. He—no, she, sometimes it was hard to tell with ogres—was a huge red-haired type, horny- hided and with the typical big blunt face. “Then a troll hit him from behind when he went down—”
“Friend of yours?”
The ogre shook her head. “No, just saw him go down. Thought he blundered in here by accident, maybe—”
“I bet a lot of people’ve been doing that,” Rik said. “Did it myself. How long ago?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“Great. Thanks.”
The battle mammoth stirred a little, a feeble jerk of the legs. “What happen?” it said. “Can’t move—”
The translation sounded a little stiff. “Game management,” Rik said as he got up and hurriedly looked the beast over, “display original language.”
The translation obligingly displayed in a split frame above the stricken character’s head. It was Chinese of some kind, Rik thought. “What is that?”
“Mandarin,” said the game management voice.
“Okay,” Rik said. “Lie still, it will be all right.” He kept his wording a little more formal for the moment. The game translation matrices famously had trouble with slang and casual usages when the servers were overloaded, which Rik could just bet they were at the moment. “I am a medic, I will help.”
He circled around and did the quickest assessment he could when the client was so very large. Head and chest were okay, but there was definitely considerable damage to the rear: a big crushing injury of the back right leg, a lot of blood loss from a torn vein. Arnulf got busy, as there was no time to waste when there was damage of this kind—not if he was going to keep this player from losing his