Fudd was not going on a quest anyway. Richard didn’t have that kind of time. He just wanted to wander around the world a bit and see what was happening. He’d been doing this a lot recently. Something was changing; there was some kind of phase transition or something under way in the society of the game. Richard didn’t know much about phase transitions other than it was what happened when ice melted. Working at Corporation 9592, however, had brought him into contact with a sufficient number of nerds with advanced degrees that he now understood that "phase transition" was an enormously portentive phrase that those guys only threw around when they wanted the other nerds to sit up and take notice. Suddenly something happened; you couldn’t exactly make out why. Or maybe—an even more haunting thought—it had happened already and he was too dim-witted, too out of touch, to get it. Which was actually why Fudd existed. Richard had other characters in T’Rain that controlled huge networks of vassals and possessed godlike powers, but for that very reason they never had to participate in the same grunt-level questing and moneymaking on which the majority of customers spent most of their time. Fudd was powerful enough to move around the world without getting jumped and killed every ten minutes, but not so powerful that he didn’t have to work at it.