"Hey there folks, step right up. Best steel in Azer! I Guarantee!"

Josl grinned voraciously as warriors lined up to examine his wears. Josl had the best location on this side of the Palantin Hills, only a few hundred meters from the entrance to the lair of the Serpent Lodnidum, and his seven reptilian honor guards. Lodnidum’s dungeon was a medium risk, high reward location, with good drop percentages on each of the honor guards, and a .02% drop rate for a Mask of the Divining Stare. There was no other monster in Azer who dropped MDS anywhere near .02% of the time. Combine the Mask with above average experience points and faster than average re-spawn rates and you had one hell of a popular dungeon.

And one hell of a lot of money.

"Josl!" A hulking barbarian stormed up to the stand, his furs bloodied and fluttering in the wind. He held something glowing bright golden in his hand. "Josl, I got another one!"

Josl smirked and waved the Barbarian toward the outdoor stand. Other players parted before the giant of a man, even as they tried to see beyond his humongous biceps to catch a glimpse at the object in his hand. Josl for his part knew exactly what Korek held the moment he’d seen that golden glow.

"You must be the luckiest man in Andea, Korek. Get a couple of more of these and you might be the luckiest man in all Azer." Josl tried to clap Korek the barbarian on the shoulder, realized mid-clap that the man’s shoulder was much higher than Josl could reach, and instead clapped him on the elbow. "I’ll give you the same price for this one."

The glowing, fully charged Mask of Divining Stare shed its golden light onto Josl and Korek alike. Korek looked down at the mask and his lips began to work at each other as if the bottom lip and the top lip were wrestling. "Hm, Josl," Korek began and then paused. He looked nervously at the scuffed wooden counter top.

Josl knew exactly what the kindly idiot was nervous about. Korek must have told someone how much he’d sold the first Mask for. Korek was a hell of a warrior, but his intelligence levels were sub-normal, and that was putting it kindly. Josl wasn’t a mean-spirited A.I. – actually, his programmed assignment placed him in the neutral good category, speaking in generalities of course. But, Josl was also a businessman, and one of the shrewdest of the ‘developed’ A.I. businessmen on the continent. He wasn’t about to give away money he might otherwise keep.

"Now, now," Josl began, his voice the very spirit of understanding. "Korek, I’ll tell you what. I spoke to some people," Josl lied, "and it seems I may have underpaid you for that first mask."

Korek, in all his kind-hearted stupidity, looked up in abject relief. Josl could see the tension melt off the larger man’s shoulders, lumpy with muscle. "Oh Josl! Josl! That’s what they said, but —" Korek considered whether he felt mentally equipped to continue the math part of this discussion and decided he would much rather get this sale done quickly and be out bashing monster skulls before the sun went down. "—that’s OK!"

Josl smiled, as if he too was relieved. "Korek, you have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that. Of course, this time I will pay the correct price. 2000 gold pieces!"

Korek’s smile faltered at the edges and his whole demeanor took on a tone of confusion. "Um, 2000?"

Josl smiled broadly as if the sum were not still 10 times less than the mask was worth. "Yes," he said with great magnanimity, "my friend!"

Korek’s lips started their tussle again. Korek was building up the courage to say something when Josl struck the killing blow.

"And the 1000 extra I owe for the first mask," the merchant said assuredly, laying out another small linen sack filled with coins, half the size of the first. "For my friend," Josl added, cocking his head in a friendly way to the side and sending his most trustworthy smile.

Korek blinked and then smiled himself. "You old croke!" Korek said, not entirely understanding what the intended words meant, but eager to sound like some of the other merchants he’d heard say something like this before, "you’ve got deal!"

Korek dropped the Mask behind the counter, where it landed with a metallic clang against the wooden floor. Josl pushed forward the 3,000 gold and Korek took them into one giant hand as if the large bags were little more than small tangerines.

After Korek had stormed off and the crowds began to disperse with the setting of the sun, Josl took out the Mask and looked at it. Pursing his lips, Josl set the price tag and placed it onto the "featured" shelves on the top of the stall.

He was about to close shop for the night when a small figure appeared from farther inside the town. It raced up to Josl’s stall at impossible speeds and, once Josl saw that his customer was a completely naked low-level elf, Josl cursed out loud.

"Oh no. Not again. They nerfed that exploit," Josl began saying, hoping it might dissuade the player from trying. "It’s nerfed! It won’t work!"

Unfortunately for Josl, Josl was lying. The exploit had not been nerfed. In fact, given the sheer size of Azer it was very likely that Josl’s NPC complaint to the development cloud had not even been read yet, despite it being over 3 months old. Josl could tell when his code had been updated or altered, and there had not been an alteration of any kind for Josl in over half a year.

Still, maybe, if this little shit was a noob, Josl could convince him to just give up the whole enterprise.

"You’ll get banned you know?" Josl started, "It doesn’t work, and if they find out they’ll ban you. Honestly." Josl gave the naked little man a look that seemed to say ‘amirite?’. "Is it worth it? I mean, really?"

The nude elf stood there for a second more in silence – these sorts never said a word – before beginning to spin like a top, right in place. Josl cursed again and braced himself for the discomfort of being exploited.

As the elf sped up, spinning in place faster and faster, his user, somewhere out in the ‘real world’, would be initiating the series of perfectly timed arrow inputs necessary to effectuate the theft. Since the Mask was in the featured section, the chain of arrow inputs would be significantly harder to pull off. In fact, there was a chance that the naked bastard wouldn’t pull it off. Josl didn’t know if that was any better, as it would just mean spending even longer having to watch the naked elf try again.

Unluckily – or luckily – it worked on the very first try. The elf spun so fast that his body blurred into a single constant light green color – the average color of the elf’s skin. All at once, the blur of skin began flitting in place, carrying out the delayed series of movement commands previously input by its user. The tiny, jerky little movements slowly, strategically dragged the spinning form toward Josl’s shop.

The blur approached the shop, got right up against the wood, and then, when it should have bounced off the wood, instead the blur passed right into it.

That was the part that ‘hurt’. Josl had been designed so that his shop was literally a part of his intrinsic form. So, whenever a user breached that form, say by noclipping into the shop, they were also briefly interfacing with Josl’s core programming. That sensation, the electronic signals of a living human brain rubbing up against Josl’s code, was as close as a sentient A.I. merchant in the world’s largest ever MMORPG could ever come to feeling real pain.

It only took a few more seconds after that. The elf floated slowly upward, through the shop, leaving a wake of chaos inside Josl’s head. When the blur of the elf had clipped to a point right behind the Mask of the Divining Stare the blur snapped into the form of a man and went totally still. A sharp buzzing filled the air as the automatic scanners detected the unauthorized noclip, and attempted to rectify the situation by dragging the little elf out of the merchant he was not supposed to be floating through.

Which reveals the exploit’s payoff – because of a simple missed parameter on the Mask of the Divining Stare, as the elf is dragged out of the shop, the Mask gets pushed out in front of his body —

— and falls to the ground beside him.

"Damned speed runners," Josl yelled, already composing the second complaint to the cloud, "no respect for anyone else."

The elf wasn’t listening. He stood up, picked up the Mask, and put it on. The moment it touched the skin of his face, the Elf began to glow brighter than the sun. A light so powerful that any human player awake within a half mile would see it shining even through the skin of their eyelids.

Josl rolled his eyes as the transformation completed.

Where once there had been a naked little elf, there was now a fire-winged God, 15 feet tall, with a tale as long as a school bus and a sword towering as high into the air as a two story home.

Even the speed runner couldn’t help but take a moment to examine his fleeting transformation in awe. Soon enough the giant God looked up toward the Palantin Hills and, with a roar that would dwarf a dozen steam trains, burst into the sky on a pillar of fire.

Josl shot a rude gesture after him. "Hope your fifteen minutes of fame is worth a six month ban!" The Mask was a temporary effect, lasting only fifteen minutes. Just long enough, if you were a very skilled player, to destroy the Axion of Malice and complete the current narrative of the story mode.

"Twat!" Josl yelled for good measure at the now distant light.