The modern world was full of ruckus, people babbling about this or that. Business was the hot topic, as it had been for all time. But since the end of R:2 service, a new buzz had started to infiltrate the backwaters of society and fill the adventurous with excitement.

The daredevils perusing the Russian forums hoping for a golden nugget found their treasure amid the chatter about a "phoenix World R:2". One such lucky hunter was a bold rebellious German named Jorg Bergmann. He immediately fell in love with the idea of breaking into the code base of The World and learning the secrets of his fellow countryman Howard Hoerwick. Thereafter, he made every effort to identify the leaders of the movement so that he could contribute. Despite his poor Russian, his efforts paid off, and Dasomov left him and Yegor Konstantinov - a.k.a. "Zontna" - in charge of figuring out the details. In this regard, Jorg - alias "Kreigbrot" - had an advantage: the main core of the code base was entirely in German.

For the first few months, Jorg had to spend time rehashing the same German translations to Yegor until finally the latter had memorized enough that they could carry on simple conversations. With the help of a pocket dictionary and some off-the-clock lessons in German, Yegor was finally able to pick up the pace.

The greatest challenge, however, was that the rest of the code base was an unorthodox blend of German and Japanese. The latter dominated user-interface code, while the former tended to handle the more complex details. The comments littering the code weren't any less convoluted, and each one of them invited a collective sigh from everyone on the The World Neuvo team having the duty of digging into the source code.

Nevertheless, once progress had picked up, people around the world started to take notice and pass the world along the internet underground. The mysterious cessation of support of The World R:2 by CyberConnect had left millions of individuals without a outlet to channel their gaming appetite. A few smaller games had been developed, but nothing quite had the sophistication nor intrigue of The World. Thus, when word finally leaked about the progress made by the small anonymous collective in the winter wonderland, a nice long list of emails of eager explorers seeking to be beta-testers was submitted to Dasomov for approval by the freshly-formed internet chat group named "Neuvo Komrads".

The state of The World Neuvo at that time put Dasomov in a tough situation. On the one hand, there was a flood of work still to be done, thousands of lines of code to check, hours of debugging to do, and gigabytes of assets to replace. On the other hand, Dasomov was thrilled that people were interested and even offering to help for free. After all, the project was meant for gamers around the world to enjoy, and knowing that they were looking forward to the game gave Dasomov the big boost of motivation he couldn't get from his morning liter of coffee.

Still, one matter did concern him. The user currently in charge of testing and coming up with new ideas was Mikmik, a person relatively unknown to Dasomov but one who had been with the project from its conception, the phase called "Dividing Heaven's Waters" or simply "Heaven's Waters". Mikmik seemed like a young, friendly fellow, but nevertheless very responsible. Dasomov wanted to hand him the responsibility of training and managing any new beta-testers, but Mikmik had not responded to any messages for over two weeks. Dasomov wasn't certain Mikmik still had an internet connection. Had there been another means of communication besides chat, Dasomov would have been hesitant to use it for security reasons, but in this case, it wasn't even an option: Mikmik's contact info was as mysterious as he was. All Dasomov knew in that regard was that Mikmik had discovered them via BBS and obtained the chat channel info from Zakhar, a.k.a. q5corbo.

Dasomov pulled up the chat channel on his laptop.

Doslad: "Anyone hear from Mikmik?"

Evan Petrovich - "Jyos" - was the first to reply. "Last I heard from him, he was on a mountain in Dun Loireag talking about some flower. Then he cut out. I haven't heard from him since."

Dasomov raised an eyebrow and typed, "He's not still in Dun Loireag is he?"

Jyos: "I checked twice, but I didn't see any flower. I haven't had time for a game of hide-and-go-seek if that's what he's doing."

Doslad: "Why would he be doing that? A game feature suggestion, maybe?"

Jyos: "That's what I figured too. I guess It's a good idea. I guess we'll eventually have to find him and see if that's what he had in mind."

Doslad: "Ok. If you find him, let him know I'd like to speak with him. I want him to oversee some new beta-testers who are going to come in and give things a spin."

Jyos: "How about some more asset sorters? What about more programmers? How about people who are actually useful?"

Doslad: "They are useful. Some people are better gamers and can push stuff to the limits that we can't or wouldn't otherwise consider. We need to cover our edge cases."

Jyos: "Whatever. Fine."

Doslad: "You'll have plenty of time to play the game when we finish."

Jyos: "Which feels like a long time. I can't seem to finish these assets."

Doslad: "I thought you were done with most of them?"

Jyos: "I was. Someone keeps deleting my work. I've had to save the game's entire folder structure in a backup just because files keep disappearing."

Doslad: "I have them though, I think. I just saw them this morning."

Dasomov opened up some folders and began carefully examining the files listed. Earlier this morning, he had seen some audio and mesh files in the directories of recently-enhanced assets for the game. A few clicks and several swipes along the virtual scrollbar of his mousepad revealed to Dasomov that none of these files were present. Searching the folder with the automatic search turned up nothing.

Doslad: "That's weird. The files are gone."

Jyos: "The repository is shared, so if..."

Doslad: "No, I'm not looking at the repository. This is my own private copy. I mean, yes, it's connected to the repository indirectly, but I didn't update it from when I checked this morning."

There was a pause.

Jyos: "That's weird."

Doslad: "Yes, it is."

Just then, Zakhar barged into the conversation under his alias q5corbo.

q5corbo: "Guys, there's something going on our new world. You need to come see this. And I mean NOW!"