Cold, Insidious, and Complex (3)
Icarus himself had never voiced any particular opinion on the matter, and frankly had no interest in it at all. What was unfolding was simply the users inside his territory each founding clans of their own.
And that situation wasn't limited to the players who'd already clustered into settlements. It had spread to the users docked at the various bases as well…
Even the mercenary users—who ordinarily kept a careful distance from the so-called average player, provided they weren't being invaded—were reacting positively to the whole affair.
And so, overnight, the more than seven thousand "citizens" of the so-called Icarus Kingdom threw themselves into clan recruitment with the feverish zeal of people launching political parties. Everyone was in on it, no exceptions.
Naturally, users in the surrounding areas—and users in other zones entirely—watched this peculiar kingdom's internal situation with the same baffled question: why did something this weird keep happening over there?
[Screenshot of Icarus Kingdom chat logs.jpg]
As you can see above, all kinds of clans are currently recruiting inside the Rank 3 player's territory.
If you look at the notice and the chat screenshots, you'll notice Icarus himself is not the one recruiting for a clan.
It's the clans that have already formed inside the territory who are looking for members.
If you've got nothing better to do in the Central Zone, or you just haven't found a clan worth joining, signing up with one of those outfits sitting in a stable zone might not be a bad move.
But reactions from other zones weren't really a problem. Situations like this had become so routine—another episode of Central Zone reality (read: chaos) being laid bare for the whole server to gawk at—that users from every zone simply shrugged it off with a collective "yeah, that's just how it is over there."
And for all that it looked like every single user had gone clan-founding mad…
Some users still clung to the classic Central Zone solo-player mindset. Under normal circumstances, that should have been the end of any further development.
The problem was that, right around this point, the notoriously scheming and underhanded Central Hub Alliance decided to stick its nose in.
At first, the Central Hub Alliance had been remarkably indifferent to whatever was happening inside Icarus's territory.
Yes, they had propped him up as the Central Zone's top dog and run any number of political operations around him—that much was true. But…
All their praise had been lip service and nothing more. Because Icarus turned out to have far less hunger for power than expected, their original plan—"found a Central Zone megaclan and pull Icarus's strings from behind the scenes!"—had gone completely out the window.
After that, even when Icarus was being hounded by other factions, even when the Zenobia Empire invaded, their response had been a casual "oh, is that so" and a shrug. By then they might as well have been total strangers.
So at first their take on users forming small clans among themselves was simply: "Without Icarus himself in the mix, what's the point?"
But as the topic kept boiling up—over and over and over—across the galleries and every other corner of the community, an idea began to surface in their minds: maybe this was something they could use…