Avengment.

Dedicated to Aaru's loss.

We've all been there, or heard stories. Horrible tales of keyloggers, accidental password loss, pin resets, company ignorance..hackers are a part of a gamer's life.

I got hacked before.
So I re-hacked the bloody rat.

I've played Maplestory since the beta of MapleSEA (South-East-Asia, before Nexon MA came out). I even have had the Mark of Beta to prove it. I was a raging Ice/Lighting Wizard of level 6x in the noble world of Aquinas. (High levels that day were treated like gods). The world was young, the Maplers noobs.

And you must understand, this was a day before Gameguard. Yes, the first 8 patches of MS-SEA had no GG plauging it's behind. Only after that did NexonSEA smarten up and calling in the hacker-proof programs.

Then came the birth of reverse-programs. Examples include GGK and the ilk. Hacking was easy, but scarce. That was nothing really worthwhile to hack. Even I myself used a good Flying Hack every so often for those damned Sleepywood jump quests.

Then, that fatal morning, when I accessed a webpage I wasn't supposed to access. My anti-virus had expired and I was worry-free.

Life went normally for a week (pardoning the unusual slow-down of many programs, which I ignored), 'til I decided to get a cracked update for my Norton-fails. As I updated, it ran a regular systems check.

It was as if someone let loose a red-eyed flying banshee in my room.

The alarms went crazy, viruses and hidden keyloggers crawling though my system. I quarantined and deleted everything that could be saved. Until it hit me harder then a 2×4 upside the head.

Maple.

I quickly logged into my main account. My heart stopped. Standing there, on the wooden platform, stood my beloved mage, stripped to his undies. The ray of light that came down from the sky was almost mocking as it highlighted the destruction.

I logged in.

I found out who it was because the idiot decided to whisper me on his main account, taunting me when I was standing stark naked in the middle of FM2 (when it was in Perion, god damnit, not them fancy global Free Markets).

My vision blurred. All those months of work, those weeks of trading fame to scrap together money for a wand, those memories of grinding and laughing..gone.

I quit. I opened my IE 6. I went to Google.

Scanning Google pages, I found that account name under a subforum of Hidden Street. The twat posted his username as his account name, and his character name as one of the "Characters".

Moving to Cheat Engine forums (back when Cheat Engine was God himself), I found out that this man, this idiot, had posted his password to his friend in a PM, and accidentally made it global to the moderators of the forum. Tracing the PM through a close friend's account (who happened to be a mod), I found an alert in his inbox, and opened it. Discarding the rubbish text, I found the message hidden within. I read the password and wrote it down.

I waited. I drank some Vanilla Coke (that shit was good back in the day).

After about 6 hours, near 0130 hours, I logged into his account. FM1 was still busy as a beenest. I found all his characters, I even found my stuff on one of his mules.

And I went to the FM and DUMPED IT ALL. Trashed it, people followed me like fruit flies as I dropped claws, mesos, 10% scrolls, throwing stars, millions and millions of mesos worth of stuff.

I dropped my stuff too. Don't ask me why, it was a personal conflict of returning to my character.

I went back to the server select. Choosing Aquinas, I proceeded to the character select screen. There they stood, all 3 of his characters, naked, glittering under the shining starlight.

Mission accomplished.

Think and judge what you will. I know two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left, and if it was going to be the last time I touched Maple (MapleSEA, that is), I wanted to go out with a bang.

~Pir <3

Post-Script:
What I think is a damn awesome story. <3