Wedge Rats Wreak Revenge!

My hubster’s a programmer. Has been since he was in elementary school, long before we met in college, that’s how long. He de-bugged his father’s punch card programs; his father worked for Pratt & Whitney. Dad had a patent with his name on it and everything. Look up the JT8D engine, and you’ll see that smarts run in the family. (Not so much common sense, but that’s a whole bunch of different stories…)

At college, our relationship developed in the computer labs. Computer science was considered a fad; boyfriend would graduate with a math degree, because the “head” of the computer science department kept downplaying its importance to the Board. He got some buddy of his to set up the computers in the labs, serially linked, with the flimsiest of password protections.

I learned I was a natural born hacker by accident, because I could break any password within three tries. Tremble, o ye nations! I chose not to take over the world back then, because I was, and am still, Lawful Good. (looks around at the dumpster fire) On second thought, maybe I shoulda given in to the urges…

Fast forward two years, my boyfriend graduates, and goes to WPI for actual computer programming. Should that three-letter acronym mean anything? Only if you’re aware of Undocumented Features…

Yep, my hubster is in there! And MegaZone, we still owe you a coffee.

Where do I come into all this?

I was not one of the Wedge Rats, though hubster definitely was. He was there for the “your trash can’s on fire” episode, as well as the Mountain Dew / Rocket Fuel episode. IYKYK, and much hilarity ensued.

Now, for my adjacent Wedge Rat immortality…

According to Avenue Q, the internet is for porn. According to my feed, the internet is for cat pics, rock hounding, and Star Trek memes (miss you, Captain Picard, thank you for restoring the continuum).

But back then, the internet was made for MUDding.

Multi User Games were The Thing for nerds who were writing the codes for interactive games. And since I was still stuck in my undergrad studies, boyfriend had nothing better to do, than consume unholy amounts of Mountain Dew, skate through his classes (the weasel, he still picks up computer languages by osmosis), and MUD till ungodly hours.

But, of course, that’s him. What about me?

If you’ve read a small fraction of my stories, I come up with Ideas.

Awful, horrible, FAFO Ideas.

I had to start somewhere.

Of course, it did not take long for boyfriend to become Wizard level in the MUDs. At that point (or at whatever level he achieved), one can program things into the MUD.

And he’d ask me for ideas of things to do against the munchkin players that were already forming out of the primordial interwebz ooze…

The lemmings, he came up with that one himself. There was a cliff that you could jump off of, to delete your character and try again. These things were announced to the whole MUD group, like a text chain you can’t opt out of. Soon the character “A Lemming” was jumping off the cliff, with a feral scream. On repeat loop. When another wizard banished “A Lemming” as a character name, “Another Lemming,” “A Bunch Of Lemmings,” “Still Another Lemming,” and “Random Group of Lemmings” joined the race to the cliff, with subsequent banishment. Boyfriend continued till another one of the guys in the lab shrieked, in real life, “WHERE ARE ALL THESE F%@&ING LEMMINGS COMING FROM?!?!” It’s fun to make admins lose their minds.

I helped with the Curse Dragon. Remember, if you shout, everyone MUDding hears it? Trolls also formed early out of the ooze, and liked to make shouty sweary noises in the chat. Boyfriend created a Curse Dragon, which would suddenly appear and eat you up if you shouted certain curse words. Not only did I double, or triple, his list, but I showed him the ways people would attempt to get around the ban. He didn’t believe me at first, but it didn’t take long for me to convince him. Honestly, I didn’t have to – the trolls did my work for me, and right on time. (I love my now hubster, but the autistic genes light up in a direct “but people wouldn’t do that!” alignment…)

He also ended up creating Curse Dragon’s Little Brother, who hung out in the chapel where new characters were created, when the trolls put the curse words into their name, instead of the shout...

The scythe modification was completely my idea. Never mind that I got the impetus from Terry Pratchett, that amazing and hysterical being that I miss so badly. (GNU Sir Terry, you are sorely missed.)

The commute from middle Massachusetts to Philly was awful, but he’d stay on my campus with mutual friends when his spring break started. One day, we were sitting in one of the lounges, and he was waxing frothy about some dude who was nagging him in the lab, to clone Death’s scythe as a magical artifact, so he could slay all manner of things with impunity. Something about an unbeatable dragon, designed that way, that you had to go through every room in this wizard’s castle sequentially, and there were a thousand, and you’d get Death’s scythe in Room 666 to kill the dragon, but just clone it for me with my undying gratitude? “Oh come on, man,” dude would say, “Just do it, so I can kill this dragon!”

And no protesting from my boyfriend would get this guy un-obsessed, and boyfriend was getting pissed, because no still means no, you know? Nope, the guy would not get off of it.

And I remembered Sir Terry’s quote, from Moving Pictures: “Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.”

And I started grinning. I’d like to think I grinned like Sir Terry’s Death, but it likely looked more like The Grinch’s grin.

Boyfriend was afraid when I said, “So, give it to him.”

And then I explained.

And boyfriend started grinning.

Dude got his scythe, all right. Weapon class 1000, when normal swords were 9-10. That’s the only stat. When boyfriend handed it over in the game, he tried to warn the dude. “Now, look, you need to-”

“Allllllll riiiiiiight, yeah!” And off dude went, slaying dragon, taking loot, slaying everyone in sight, just like boyfriend tried to warn him not to, slay slay slay, one horse open slay, slay some more, cole slay shred, I'm losing the metaphor. Too much slay, for sure.

Dude was doing a victory dance, crowing to boyfriend about all the kills (the giants in the Niflheim range! A frost dragon! Elemental golems! All the things that were nearly unbeatable!), and delightedly giggling about his million experience points. Boyfriend glanced at the screen. “Hmm. How many experience points?”

Dude refreshes screen. “Wait. What? Now it’s only nine hundred thou.”

“Hunh. What about now?”

“Wait, eight hundred thou and change? What’s happening?”

“What do you think is happening?”

Because Dude McMunchkin didn’t listen to my boyfriend when he warned about not getting carried away, and went on a killing spree. And then stopped.

The scythe did not get the memo.

When the scythe wasn’t scything, the scythe needed to feed. On whoever was available.

And that would be the bearer of said scythe.

And when the experience points ran out, after taking 100,000 every minute or so, the hit points were next.

Dude didn’t last long.

The ghost of Unicorn (yes, that was his user name) cursed him, the universe, my boyfriend in particular, and everything else. Boyfriend just leaned back, still laughing, and laced his hands behind his back. “Told you it wasn’t a good idea, but did you listen? Nope. Now play right, or log out.”

Dude chose to log out. So much for undying gratitude.

Time blunts our memories. I remember telling boyfriend to add the “take your experience points, then your hit points, if you’re not actively killing something” code. Boyfriend-now-hubster remembers looking at the code, realizing the stats were written so well that he was worried for nothing, so he just handed the guy his own doom. Either way, thousand room wizard, if you’re reading this, let us know? I don’t want to screw you out of your due coding chops for my own ego, but damn I remember riding a high of advising a coder on how to give a munchkin some just desserts.

I totally freaked out our friends, decades later, when Al Gore either tripped on his tongue, or was misinterpreted (don’t care which), and was the seven days’ talking point. In a room full of friends, most of whom were WoW gamers but hubster was the only coder, they were outraged that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. They were slyly looking to my hubster for a reaction; they weren’t expecting mine, when I laughed and said, “Funny, I don’t remember him in the Wedge with us.”

Now, was I there? Once, because I only got to visit him once on campus. Was I over-inflating my importance in the grand scheme of things? Yes, I was. My friends didn’t need to know that, but boy did they suddenly stop giving us as much grief as before.

Once, even more years later, another WPI alum moved in down the street from our apartment. It was startling to bump into her on the street, for her to do a double-take at my hubster, and blurt, “YOU’RE [nickname redacted], FROM UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES! Oh, wow, I’m living up the street from a legend!” Why thank you, ma’am, I do have good taste, and thank you very much for fawning on him for that accomplishment, and not that of his features, that resemble a certain porn star…

But that’s another story.