Breakfast was better, with the three of them all talking about Zula, telling stories about her fondly, as people did of the dead. Dad listened to the stories and nodded and smiled at the right parts. Richard hugged them, got in the Grand Marquis, drove to the FBO, and was back in Seattle four hours later. That was Friday. During the weekend he stayed home, online most of the time, hovering over the Torgai in one window while, in others, scanning real-time statistics from T’Rain’s databases. He did not care about the details. He doubted that any of this was going to help at all. But he had made a determination, early last week, that it might conceivably help them get more information if the Torgai remained chaotic and did not fall under the control of any one particular Liege Lord. His expedition to Cambridge and to Nodaway had been solely to ensure the requisite level of chaos, and it seemed to have worked. Don Donald, after a slow start, was now five deep, with tens of thousands of tastefully appointed vassals, and he’d apparently had the good sense to delegate military decisions to players who had actually done this before. Skeletor meanwhile had dusted off his most powerful character, which he hadn’t played in several months, and had made a fairly impressive bid to penetrate all the way into the middle of the castle where D-squared’s character was holed up and assassinate him. At the last minute, he had been detected and killed so fast that he hadn’t had time to Sequester all his Virtual Property. So that stuff had fallen into the hands of the Earthtone Coalition (which couldn’t use it because it was so tawdry), and Skeletor’s character had emerged from Limbo naked and impoverished and considerably diminished in power. Which was probably for the better anyway, since Devin had other characters better suited to play the role of warrior king: less powerful but with deeper and more well-developed vassal networks.