Forced Login

by R K Billiau

  Jake nodded. “Hell yeah, here I thought we were in for a slog to level our skills, but this is way more interesting.”

  “How long will it take to harvest?” Kai asked. “It’s pretty dark now, and full night is not far.”

  Jake shrugged. “I don’t know, never done this before. I’ll go get the others and we’ll get started right away.” He headed into the cave leaving the three of us outside in the dusk.

  It was about that time the smells drifting from the cave made me realize I was hungry. “I suppose we should eat and rest up, then head out tomorrow to find more cores.”

  Chief Arnold gestured towards the cave. “You deserve it, it’s been a big day for us all, and you’ve been a huge help. Kai, please come with us, I can ask other Hunters to guard while the team dresses this bison.” Kai gave the Chief a nod and headed in. I followed, the smell of cooking meat almost making me do one of those cartoon character floating sequences.

  Before I had time to sit by the fire Cora came up to us. The redness of the wound on her arm was still visible, but her demeanor was notably better. “Hey, Hudson, right? Look... I’m sorry I freaked out earlier. The lack of food, not being able to pick a class, the constant attacks... it all got... anyway... thanks for helping us… I-”

  I interrupted her since she seemed like she was having a rough day and apologizing was never easy. “Hey, don’t worry about it, I accept your apology, but it’s unnecessary. I haven’t gone through the same terrible stuff you guys have; it sounds miserable. I think we can change that now though.”

  The woman gave a slight smile, the small amount of hope showing on it being overridden by the weariness. “Look, I… can we go out and talk alone for a moment?” She placed her hand on my shoulder, her fingers gently brushing me.

  Women were always my weakness. Not being romantic or anything with them, more… interacting with them. A blush crept up my face, and I opened my mouth to say something, leaving it open and waiting for my brain to catch up. She was attractive, and that always made me freeze up. She cocked her head at me, a cute smirk forming.

  You have gained a point in Emotion!

  That attribute increase slowed the blood-flow from places unwanted. I was about to check my log to see why that particular attribute had gone up, but Chief Arnold came and stood in front of the fire to call everyone’s attention. His aura surrounding him caused everyone to stop what they were doing and look before he even spoke. That had to be a skill.

  “Ascendants! We have not had an easy time in our new lives here in this world. There is adversity at every corner, we have been betrayed by our own, and harassed by what seems like every living thing. Leveling has been hindered, for our skills, our classes, and even the tribe itself has languished at the lowest level as we have achieved so little. We have been starving, injured, and depressed. What we found could change all that. We now have hope, and with that hope will come an end to the misery so we can live our lives not in pain and fear, but in the light of the new world, able to face it and grow as we had always desired!

  “This man,” the Chief pointed at me, “Hudson, has come out of the tutorial zone with a class even greater than a Basic class, an Advanced class called Treasure Hunter. He has skills that have helped to figure out how we can escape the misery and achieve our goals!”

  I was never one for attention, preferring to just be behind the scenes doing my job, but I knew this was a turning point for the tribe. Stepping up next to Chief Arnold I took the core out of my charm slot, holding it up for everyone to see.

  The Chief continued. “He holds a core, an item that can drop from the creatures in this world. Some of these cores can grant attunement to one of the eight Elements listed on our character sheets. We don’t understand what that means yet, but one thing we do know is; by equipping one of these we are no longer ‘Kill On Sight’ for the wildlife!”

  There was a stunned silence in the cave, followed by a hopeful shouting as the tribe whooped with joy at the one thing they all needed more than anything. Hope.

  Congratulations! You have increased your Empathy attribute!

  Congratulations! You have increased your Emotion attribute!

  That night was one of the best nights I had ever had. Several of the tribe members had cooking skills as their carryover, and the tribe put together every last scrap of resources; various tubers, berries, herbs and whatever small amount of things they had gathered during the times when had they escaped attack, and created a remarkable feast. It was unlike I anything I had ever had before. The food was just the beginning however, the camaraderie, the sense of family that we shared as we talked about our trials and tribulations in PrimeVerse. About our lives back on Earth. It was a bonding moment for the tribe, it felt like a new beginning to an exciting story. I even got a few more points in my Emotion and Connection attributes.

  The evening was made even more powerful by the return of Jake and his tribe members that had been helping him dress the bison. He came in with another 10lb of meat, a collection of bones, and a huge skin with an impressive toughness.

  “We leveled our Field Dressing skill up almost 8 points just from that single bison!” he crowed. “We all got into a mini-game to collect everything. We learned the higher our skills are, the more we can get out of the kill.”

  One forager who had been with Jake’s team, Armand I think his name was, also spoke up. “When we worked on it with the Hunters, we each gained a couple levels of Primitive Crafting, and learned recipes for what to do with our collections. We learned how to make water skins, spoons, and bedding!” This last one got the entire tribe excited. I guess sleeping on hard dirt in a cave was crappy. Armand had a crowd as he sat down with the skin and started crafting. After a while he finished and came out with a crude bedroll that got a line of people waiting to try laying down on it.

  The night wrapped up, and with a rotating guard, the tribe shut down for sleep. I was offered the bedroll to sleep on for my part in getting it, and graciously accepted. As I was preparing to sleep for the night Cora came up to me, she had been a little social butterfly during the evening, always in the thickest of conversations.

  “Hey handsome,” she said. “We didn’t get a chance to talk earlier.” She traced her fingers on my shoulder and I felt my face heat up. It didn’t help that the Hunters clothes were pretty skimpy on women. Traditional incel programmers you know. She looked around quickly then leaned in close, her face just inches from mine. I gulped. “I wanted to thank you for finding out about the attunements… that’s going to make life much easier.” Her hands wrapped mine, her body heat sending heat waves to parts of my overly-hormonal body. “I can’t thank you… properly… here, but maybe we could get some time alone outside tomorrow.” She licked her lips, and I stood there dumbfounded.

  I opened my mouth to say something but was cut off by Chief Arnold calling for Cora. She winked at me and walked off towards Arnold. My mouth gaped like a fish for a moment before I realized she had taken my new bedskin with her when she left. I smirked at that, then laid down. I could have chased after her, but I had been sleeping on the island, a climate-controlled paradise, so I didn’t feel the need. I understood the next morning why there was such a commotion about the bedding when I saw my wonderful new debuff.

  Bad Night’s Sleep!

  Due to sleeping conditions you have gotten a poor night of sleep, your expendables regeneration have been reduced by 10%.

  I found Kai already up and awake doing stretches outside the entrance to the cave. “What’s up with that Sleep debuff? That sucks!”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, it gets worse, the more bad nights you have. Each week it gets 10% worse. Stacks with starvation too.”

  “I see why everyone here has been miserable. We gotta get out there and find some cores!”

  “That’s the plan today. We also have to find Austin while we are out there.”

  “That other Hunter? Do we have a quest?”

  “No quest, but usually people kn
ow how to get back from the spawn point. He never showed up so Cora asked us to keep an eye out for him. Him not returning is odd.”

  I still felt like kind of an ass for forgetting the guy. “So you want to go look for him first? Is the spawn point static, or does it move around?”

  “There are three separate spawn points, I know where they all are having been to each of them.” Kai coughed. “Finding Austin is important, but we need to keep the cores coming in for the tribe first, finding him is secondary to that.”

  “Kai has the long and short of it,” a voice behind me said. Chief Arnold had joined us. “The fact of the matter is, the more people we have attuned, the easier our life will be here, so that has to be a priority. Do you think you can get more bison for us?”

  “With Kai helping to pull, I think so. I almost died getting that one back here, but with two of us, and, I am assuming he has more HP than me what with being a fighter and all, it should be much easier! The only thing is making sure there’s a good squad of Hunters to help take it down when we get back.”

  Chief Arnold pointed towards the entrance. “After the food yesterday, none of us have the starvation debuff anymore so morale is high. When Jake told us his Bad Night’s Sleep debuff faded also, every Hunter wants to take part in this. If we could get beds for everyone that would be a significant benefit.”

  “I agree, that debuff sucks. Another thing to consider though is if the cores are dropped from individual mobs, finding them might go a lot slower hunting bison than if we lured back nests of rabbits.”

  “That’s a good point. How does your skill work, anyway? Do you need to get a hit in on the targets or anything? I wish we knew how to form groups.”

  “What’s up with that, anyway?! I bet that’s why there’s no XP gain from these mobs. I don’t even know how to answer your question, I have so little experience. I just don’t know.”

  “Ah well, I guess today can be a great day to learn! How about this; rotate your pulls between nests of rabbits and bison if you can.”

  “That works,” I said. “I think we will start with a rabbit nest, if Kai and I both find one we should be able to pull a couple in and maximize the chances of getting cores that way.”

  “I’ll have a team ready to go.” The Chief clasped hands with me and headed into the cave to round up the Hunters.

  “Ready to go lure some rabbit nests? I can find them easy on my map, then we can reel them in!”

  “Wait, what map?”

  Chapter 11

  I filled Kai in on my mini-map as we walked. He was excited about it until I told him it was part of one of my class skills. “So, I won’t be able to get it?” he asked.

  “You know as well as I do,” I said, shrugging. “I mean I have other skills I’ve learned just from trying to do them, so I imagine you could learn it somehow. It’s weird how few System things there are. There’s no hovering names or HP bars, no way to group, no private messaging, none of the typical MMORPG stuff. I don’t know if the designers were going for realism or what, but it’s a little frustrating.”

  “All that stuff could be here, and we just don’t know how to access it yet,” he said. “It’s not super realistic to have glowing piles of loot show up, or mini-games for Field Dressing.”

  “Good point. I guess some stuff I haven’t tried figuring out anyway, having not had other people to try it with. There’s a nest coming up.” I pointed towards the rabbit’s nest that showed up on my mini-map.

  Kai followed my finger and seeing the nest stopped. He got a strange grin on his face. “Do you mind if I get out there and solo it? I only need 11xp to level up.”

  I nodded at him. “Sure, go for it!”

  Kai charged off toward the rabbits and swept his leg out in a kick that sent one rabbit flying away, and the rest jumped at him, their aggro being set off. It was fun to watch Kai in action. Not a single rabbit could land on him as he dodged and leapt out of the way. He did this for over a full minute, leaping about like crazy, dodging every attack. Then he went on the offensive and started open hand slapping the fuzz-balls of death out of the air and straight to the ground. As he finished off the last rabbit, I got to witness someone level up from the outside.

  Kai’s form raised off the ground almost two feet, and a glowing, golden energy surrounded him. I halfway expected his hair to elongate and turn blonde, but thankfully that was left out. “All right!” Kai said, “level 2! It sucked we couldn’t level up during the tutorial, and it was a serious pain in the ass trying to find anything to hunt out here for XP! Sorry that took so long, I was trying to get my Active Dodge skill up.”

  “Active Dodge? I just got that skill!” I said. I took a quick look at the skill, having forgotten to see what it did yet.

  Active Dodge: +10% to Dodge when focusing on not getting hit. +.25% per level of skill.

  “So far I have three dodge abilities,” he said, “the regular Dodge from your Agility score, Active Dodge, and my Martial Artist skill grants Instinctive Dodge, another bonus, but it only applies to being caught off-guard.” He grinned at me, gloating in his skills. I mean he had a right too, they sounded super cool.

  “Damn you must be hard to hit! I didn’t know about the Active Dodge skill until my adventure with the bison. It’s crazy how much stuff there is to learn and know. Like, I think there’s a way to get different character classes. There’s; Primitive, Basic, Advanced and all the way up to Epic classes, it makes me think there has to be a way to change later. What do you think?”

  “I agree with you, just the fact that Treasure Hunter is a class is another clue, there is no way there would be so many classes that there are esoteric ones like that without being a way to change out.”

  I laughed. “True that. It’ll be interesting to figure it all out.”

  Kai nodded. “Hey, so I know our Hunters can take out rabbits, and even you can if you get your sneak attacks in on them, what if we rounded up a bunch of rabbit nests to bring back to the cave? It could go way faster than one at a time and I think it’s manageable. With your map and my dodging, we should be able to pull 3 or 4 nests and give them a nice surprise!”

  “Train to zone?” I asked.

  Kai chuckled. “Exactly! Except we will help, we won’t be bringing certain death, hah.”

  “Let’s do it! I have the threat zone figured out for the rabbits so if we had a way to map out the nests, we could figure out the most efficient and safe way to gather them.” I zoomed out my mini-map as far as I could and studied it, looking for the telltale movement of rabbit nests.

  “Can you add markers or arrows or something to your map?” Kai asked. I looked at him dumbfounded.

  “Why haven’t I thought of that?” I asked him, as if he’d know. I focused on my mini-map thinking of the cave and adding a quest marker. A faded chevron appeared in the ring of the mini-map. I turned and watched as it spun around the dial always pointing the same way.

  Congratulations! You have increased your Illugraphy skill!

  Congratulations! You have increased your Conscious attribute!

  “I leveled up a skill!” I shouted. “Thanks, man, this is awesome! Give me a minute to try a few things.”

  “Sure, I’ll go scouting, maybe try to work on my Stealth a little,” Kai said.

  “Hold on!” I concentrated on Kai and thought about adding him to my mini-map but nothing happened. “Damn, I can’t add a marker for you. Maybe I need to level it up. Okay, you go Stealthy I’ll just be a few minutes.” I watched as Kai crouched down. “I can still see you,” I told him. A flat stare was the only response I got.

  Focusing on my mini-map I tried to do all the things I had seen mini-maps do before in other games. I pinged the map, selecting a point for a yellow ripple effect to originate from, but without a group I didn’t see much use for that. I could add map markers that would create their own pointing chevrons and could change the chevrons colors to be whatever I wanted. I could even add emoji-like pictograms to show where I
found the rabbit nest we had just taken out, and could add markers that didn’t leave chevrons but allowed for text. After all my fussing about I had gained another 3 points in Illugraphy, bringing it up to 9! I was just about to try something else when a hand clapped me on the shoulder sending me about ten feet into the air screaming like I had forgotten to enter puberty.

  “Didn’t see me that time, did you?” Kai winked.

  “Holy crap man! I think I almost got a point in Jumping from that!”

  Kai chuckled mercilessly. “Are you ready yet? I’ve found another couple of nests. This whole ‘not being attacked’ thing is great.”

  “Oh, yeah, let me just re-loot those rabbits you took out real quick.”

  “You can still see them? They’ve already faded away for me.”

  “Not their corpses, but I can still see little loot piles. I bet they would fade too if I ignored them long enough or got too far away.” I walked over to the piles and looted them, getting a few meats and furs. “Okay lead me to where you found the nests. I can make map markers now, so I’ll be able to get an idea of how to set this up to maximize our pull.”

  Kai took me on a small trip towards a couple nests, and I found another on my mini-map. Adding markers to each of them, I gave it some thought, and made the marks’ translucence fade in and out by distance, some markers became more translucent than others. “This is going to be great. We’ve got three nests here, I say we aggro them all, and run past this first one to see if it’s re-spawned and bring them all back to the cave.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kai said and cracked his knuckles.

  “Do you have a ranged attack for pulling, or something weak? I would hate for you to be one-shotting every target.”

  “I’ve got it covered,” he said.

  “Okay, follow me then,” I said and headed to the furthest nest. As soon as we got close, I saw Kai dig into his belt and the rabbits all screamed, charging at him. I guess removing your attunement was a sure-fire way to gather aggro. I followed the chevrons, and in a few short minutes we had a horde of angry, vorpal bunnies charging after Kai. The first nest had re-spawned, and I made a mental note to Archive about how long the nest’s spawn timer was. We ran down the plain following my map towards the cave, the screaming rabbits trying to eat Kai the whole way. I hope he was getting good Instinctive Dodge increases because he for sure was getting chewed on by the ones he couldn’t dodge. I saw him dodging successfully more than a few times, however.