by Mamare Touno
Today was supposed to have been a red-letter day: the application date for the twelfth Elder Tales expansion pack. Today, data that players had downloaded in advance would be unlocked, giving the world of Elder Tales new items and zones, new monsters and battles, and—most important of all—raising the level maximum.
Since it was the day of the expansion pack introduction, there were bound to have been a ton of players linked to the game world. Shiroe had no way to check the actual numbers, but he could see from his friend list that many of his comrades had been online.
Shiroe was a veteran Elder Tales player. He’d been playing the game for eight years, ever since middle school.
This gigantic network game had more than 100,000 fans in Japan alone. Worldwide, more than twenty million people were crazy about it, and it had fascinated Shiroe for a very long time.
Of course Shiroe had been looking forward to the new expansion pack, too, but the idea of acting like a giddy newbie embarrassed him, so he’d decided to just play the way he normally did. He’d been looking out for a pair of twins lately. From what he could remember, he’d gone to a beginner’s area to help them practice hunting, given them a little advice, and had been telling them about items.
At that point, there was a yawning gap in his memory.
He seemed to recall watching some sort of demo.
Letters of flame gleaming on a black screen.
A sky brimming with sticky asphalt darkness that scrolled past at ferocious speed, with a white moon like a hole cut out of the blackness.
…And that was all.
Now he was here, running through the streets of Akiba, real legs—his own legs—pounding the ground.
A lilting tone, like xylophone notes, rang in his ears. The familiar chime signaled the arrival of a telechat. Shiroe narrowed his eyes, concentrating his attention on his forehead, and chose “Select” from the menu that appeared in his mind’s eye. He’d learned that particular operation just after being dropped into this game world, as soon as he’d gotten over the initial panic.
“Shiro, where are you?”
“Almost there.”
With his old friend’s voice in his ears, Shiroe turned right again, rounding the corner of another ruined building that looked ready to come tumbling down.
There was a damp smell on the gentle wind. The wind made a clear, brisk sound as it brushed through the treetops. And that bright light… It was the weightless sort of light that only appears in early summer. There in the chilly wind, rather than the heat of sunlight, it seemed to be an endless white blast, pure and overwhelming in its intensity. Under that early summer light, the ancient trees and buildings cast jet-black shadows on the dark soil and asphalt of the avenue. The contrast was beautiful.
The landscape that spread out before Shiroe was Akiba, his hometown in the game world. He’d seen it too many times to count, but now it completely enveloped him, bringing with it an overpowering sense of reality that was beyond the capacity of any game.
He was there, running through the middle of it on his own two feet. With every step, he felt himself slide as the wet moss crumbled beneath his shoes. He could feel his heart pushing blood into every last corner of his exercise-warmed body.
This was undeniably reality.
The town of Akiba was just as Shiroe remembered it. The buildings that seemed on the verge of crumbling, the barracks tavern with its many annexes that had been built at different times, the great trees with roots that ran across the road… This was the Akiba of the game: The sacred ground of an ancient people, coexisting with the green forest even as it slowly sank into it. A hometown for players in the eastern area of the crescent-shaped archipelago Yamato, it was located in Eastal, the League of Free Cities, and was the central city of the Japanese Elder Tales server.
Shiroe ran down the central avenue, turning at the corner of a three-story combination inn and tavern. The crumbling ruins were concrete buildings. All sorts of buildings and landmarks from the real-world Akihabara—SUFTEC, Yashikayama Electric, Kuruta Tower—had been recreated inside Elder Tales as ruins from another century.
Sleeping remnants of that ancient time were scattered all over this world. Some were enormous underground ruins, others were towers that soared into the sky, and still others were towns like Akiba.
It was a strange sight: A log annex clinging to a gigantic concrete structure that had nearly turned to rubble, and all of it wrapped in the embrace of an ancient tree. As Shiroe reached his destination, Naotsugu got up from where he’d been sitting on a fallen chunk of concrete and came to meet him. The light that angled in through the gaping windows, long empty of glass, shone down on the two with a crystal clarity impossible for any game screen to render.
Naotsugu’s face was pale, but even so, he grinned and smacked the hilt of his sword. He had a sturdy build and stood a bit over 180 centimeters. Right now, he looked for all the world like a battle-hardened warrior: He was wearing steel armor that looked formidably tough, if plain, and he carried a shield on his back.
“Hey, Shiro!”
“Naotsugu. I, uh… Good morning.”
Shiroe didn’t know quite how to respond to Naotsugu’s greeting, and he ended up sounding brusque.
The standard version of Elder Tales was equipped with a voice chat function that let players talk to their friends while they gamed, using a microphone and speaker connected to their computer. Some users didn’t like audio chats, preferring to type instead, but Shiroe and Naotsugu hadn’t been among them. That meant Shiroe was very familiar with Naotsugu’s voice.
Naotsugu Hasegawa. When anyone asked Shiroe whom he could count on in this game, that was one of the first names that came to mind.
Online games are played over the Internet, and Elder Tales belonged to the massively multiplayer (or multiuser) category. In these games, anywhere between several hundred and several thousand users access the same game space and play simultaneously. In other words, the games are designed to let players encounter throngs of other players in the game world and either cooperate or compete with them. Shiroe had played Elder Tales for many years, and naturally, he had quite a few acquaintances in the game.
However, acquaintances made in the game world tended to stay there. Although it depended on play styles and individual mind-sets, almost no users played under their real identities. Network crimes had continued to rise since the year 2000, and protecting personal information was just common sense, something one did in order to survive in an online society.
That didn’t mean it was impossible to make real friends.
Naotsugu knew Shiroe’s real name. He was one of the few players to whom Shiroe had given his real-world contact information, and they’d even met outside the game in real life.
…All of which meant that hearing Naotsugu’s voice was a relief to Shiroe. He was one of the players Shiroe was closest to in Elder Tales. Although they’d met off-line a few times, they’d blown far, far more time on dumb conversations held online through their monitors. As members of the Debauchery Tea Party, Shiroe and Naotsugu had spent countless days and nights traveling to endless outlying zones and plunging through battles together.
They’d had all sorts of empty-headed conversations. They’d even had confidential talks about trivial things, the sort of talks that made the friendship seem too close to have been formed through a game.
To Shiroe, this cheerful, reliable voice meant “Naotsugu.”
“So what’s the deal? Did Elder Tales actually evolve this far while I was gone? It’s so awesome it’s kind of a turnoff. I don’t think you could do all this by improving particle systems or rendering engines. Could you? I mean, is this some kind of joke?”
Naotsugu’s big mouth was set in an irritated line. Even that cheerful voice of his, the one that was always talking back, seemed a bit gray and subdued.
“Seriously, this is out of my league. I give up.”
Shiroe nodded vaguely, then raised the staff he held.
The staff was the sort commonly found in fantasy games: made of wood, taller than Shiroe, and quite obviously meant for a Magician. It looked as though someone had taken a gnarled branch, polished it up, and added decorative metal bits for reinforcement. Anyone who wanted to see something like this in the real world would have had to go to a costume shop.
Possibly because he’d picked up on Shiroe’s silent gesture, Naotsugu looked down at himself. He was wearing heavy-duty steel armor that looked as if it weighed several dozen kilos. He carried a shield on his back, and there was a sword in the embellished sheath that hung at his side. He could have been a warrior straight out of a fantasy tale.
“…Well, I guess I look like a cosplayer, too.”
“Yes. Yes, you do.”
They both laughed, and although you couldn’t have called it cheerful laughter, it wasn’t subdued, either.
“You know, though… You really look like yourself.”
“So do you.”
Each of them looked the other over carefully. Fundamentally, both looked like their Elder Tales game characters, but the original characters had been polygon graphics, far from photo-realistic. Now, both were physically there and as detailed as reality.
A closer look revealed that the game hadn’t simply been translated to real life. Both the male and female characters in Elder Tales had been designed to be good-looking. The slick modeling was a natural marketing response to user demand: Very few users would willingly pay money to play a game in which they were homely.
That said, Naotsugu didn’t just look like a real version of his handsome Elder Tales polygon model. Shiroe could see traces of the real-world Naotsugu, the one he’d met several times.
“Your face looks kinda like you, Naotsugu.”
The striking vertical scar that had bisected one of the game character’s eyebrows was gone, and he could make out the real Naotsugu’s bright eyes, tilted slightly downward at the outer corners, and the boyish smile that made him seem younger than he was.
“You, too, Shiro. You’ve got that creepy sanpaku-eyes thing going, so it’s like you’re always glaring, and you look like some kind of honor student with those glasses.”
Shiroe had heard similar things about his face from acquaintances for as long as he could remember. Apparently they were true for this version of it, too. Shiroe tossed his usual response Naotsugu’s way: “Just drop it, all right?”
“What’s actually going on? If you know anything, spill it, you shifty Machiavelli-with-glasses.”
“I’d love to tell you, but I’ve got no idea.”
Shiroe didn’t have much information on the current situation, either.
Shiroe and Naotsugu had kicked away the scattered chunks of concrete and were sitting down. This building was much closer to the center of Akiba than the area on the outskirts of town where Shiroe had woken up a short while ago. If he listened hard, he could hear the uproar from the city center as a faint murmur.
“Well, first off… This isn’t a dream. Right?”
“Right.”
Shiroe nodded.
When he’d come to, he’d found himself in a familiar place, but it wasn’t a place that existed in reality. It seemed to be the world of the game he knew like the back of his hand. Elder Tales was set in a world of sword and sorcery, which players journeyed through using Adventurer characters they’d created as alter egos. The body Shiroe currently inhabited was the one the game character Shiroe had used.
That said, it seemed to have acquired a resemblance to the real-world Shiroe.
“What about your status?”
“I checked.”
Because Elder Tales was a game, Adventurers were equipped with various quantified abilities, such as physical strength and stamina. In the game, players used icons to select status displays for their abilities and every possible action from a menu.
In this world, a simple look around showed no signs of any game-related display. However, if they focused their attention on their foreheads, a range of data displays and icons appeared, layered over whatever they were looking at. Within thirty minutes after regaining consciousness, both Naotsugu and Shiroe had discovered that they could mentally move the cursors to select items.
Immediately afterward, they’d noticed the telechat function. This function could be used to contact friends who were also playing the game but were far away. In other words, it was the Elder Tales version of a cell phone. However, it could only be used with acquaintances registered to a player’s friend list.
When Shiroe—concentrating on his forehead and struggling desperately with the unfamiliar operations—had discovered Naotsugu’s name on his friend list, he’d been so startled and glad to see it that he’d yelled aloud. Naotsugu had been surprised when Shiroe contacted him, but he’d readily agreed to meet at a nearby ruin.
“………”
“………”
Silence. Both Shiroe and Naotsugu were thinking of what to tell the other and where to start, but the answer was already clear. Shiroe probably knew a bit more about the circumstances than Naotsugu. As far as Shiroe knew, Naotsugu hadn’t accessed Elder Tales for two years.
Shiroe told Naotsugu everything he knew, although that wasn’t much. There were all sorts of things he could tell Naotsugu about the two years he’d been away from the game, but Shiroe knew nothing about the background or cause of the impossible incident they’d gotten caught up in.
He knew they’d been about to introduce the new expansion pack, Homesteading the Noosphere. He knew he’d been playing with some newbies near the city when he’d gotten dragged into this mess. He knew that this place looked just like the town of Akiba, his starting point in Elder Tales, that they seemed to have the bodies of their game characters, and that they’d inherited the characters’ equipment and items as well.
Come to think of it, I wonder what happened to the twins? —I’ll have to check on them later.
He also knew he knew nothing at all about whatever had caused all this.
While Shiroe talked, Naotsugu listened quietly. He asked questions about a few topics he wasn’t familiar with, but he didn’t interrupt with his own ideas.
Shiroe wasn’t partial to noise. Not that he hated it when things were lively; he just didn’t like chaotic uproar. Naotsugu may have been cheerful and easily carried away, but he wasn’t such an idiot that he couldn’t listen when people were talking. Their personalities were different, but—possibly because each had enough leeway to match the other’s pace—they got along surprisingly well.
“…Huhn. Hm. A different world, huh? —Some other world, and we got sucked in. Everything turned real…”
“What were you doing here, Naotsugu? You came back?” Shiroe asked.
“Yeah. I heard about the new expansion pack. Things had settled down at work, and I thought I’d log in and see what was up.”
—A comeback.
Naotsugu came back, Shiroe thought. He was trying to come back…
If he recalled correctly, Naotsugu was two years older than he was. They’d met about four years ago. By then, Shiroe had already been a senior Elder Tales player. Guys who’d been messing with computers since middle school weren’t rare, but even among them, Shiroe was an extreme indoors type. Specifically, even when he went outdoors, he was mentally indoors: a kid who always managed to be on his own, even in a crowd.
He moved on to high school, then to college, but his interests stayed the same, and there was hardly a day when he didn’t journey through virtual space.
By that time, Elder Tales already had a certain special standing among online games. It was so good that gamers told other gamers, “If you want to play a really solid game, play Elder Tales.”
For example, Elder Tales housed the Half-Gaia Project, a crazy-sounding plan on a mind-boggling scale. It was a project to create a half-sized version of Earth.
The town of Akiba, the initial starti
ng point for players on the Japanese server, was located in Tokyo’s spot on the Japanese archipelago. The initial starting points on the North American server were Big Apple and South Angel. The terms “Japanese server” and “North American server” were just for convenience’s sake: The unified network formed by the multiple servers that connected to these two made it theoretically possible to journey to a different continent or the ends of the earth. In other words, it was possible to immigrate to another server. This was a tough thing to do in regular MMO games, and it was one of Elder Tales’s selling points. Of course, the Half-Gaia Project was a very long-term goal, and at present, the in-game Gaia wasn’t a complete replica of the world.
In Elder Tales, the world was divided up into zones. A zone was a unit used to express area or range within games. There were vast field zones haunted by vicious monsters like the Fuji Sea of Trees, dungeon zones that acted as the stage for adventures like the ruined Shinjuku station building, and noncombat areas like the Akiba urban zone. There were even tiny zones the size of hotel rooms. Some zones were available for purchase and could be bought by a player who’d saved up enough in-game currency.
The zones were connected to each other in various ways. Since the borders between field zones were invisible, with one zone flowing seamlessly into the next, players tended not to pay much attention to exactly which zone they were in. If one was on the move, they’d cross into the next zone long before noticing. Other zones were sometimes clearly partitioned. For example, if a building or room acted as an independent zone, it was normal for a door or gateway to function as the threshold between zones.
To the best of Shiroe’s knowledge, the Japanese server already administered several hundred thousand zones, and the developer had spread the game all over the world through multiple subcontractors. In a game this vast, players like Shiroe who’d been around for years and had commensurate knowledge were considered reliable and convenient. As a result, over the course of his gaming career, Shiroe had been approached by all sorts of guilds. He’d joined one for a short while, just to see what it was like.