Ring of Promise: A LitRPG novel (Elements of Wrath Online Book 1)

by J. A. Cipriano

  World News Network broadcast, April 21, 2213

  Be any kind of hero you want to be! Elementalis Online’s Gem system allows you to customize your selection from nine Classes to create the champion of the Elements you desire! Slot magic in a warrior? Done! Have a healing rogue? Easy! Tank as a wizard? You can do it! Add more depth with Modification Gems and Passive Gems, then link them all through the gear slot system. Millions of combinations are possible in the most diverse MMORPG in the world!

  Press release for Elementalis Online, March 3, 2218

  2

  I was cutting it close to the two-hour automatic log out, too close to turn in the bounty at the edge of Stonefire. Not wanting to risk coming back into the game with a freshly spawned Scorchtusk or any other annoying MOB trying to eat my face, I added Kayla and Burndall to my social list and bid my farewells, cracking a Return Crystal to teleport my rocky self to Granholm. I didn’t even bother waiting for the heart of the Craggar city to finish loading in before hitting the logout sequence.

  Logging out was always a bittersweet thing for me and it wasn’t any different that day. As EO’s world dissipated into a cloud of pixels, a weird sense of weightlessness came over my body as I floated up and away. The world was a blur of pastel colors for a few long seconds before things resolved into the glowing streets and exotic architecture of the deep-dive NSAF network. This was the new information superhighway even if the only real information to be found here was artistry.

  The Filter was as in place here as it was in Elementalis, which meant that most of the heavy lifting of banking, shopping, news, and all that day-to-day stuff was still contained in the more archaic Internet.

  However, in deep-dive, with its fully immersive environment and no barriers to creativity, art, music, and interactive fiction thrived. Here, imagination and effort were the only limits to what you could achieve in terms of new images and new stories. That’s why so much of the gaming industry dived onto the NSAF technology when it became commercially available.

  As much as it would be a joy to linger here, I couldn’t. The log-out timer was king throughout the deep dive network, a safeguard from immersion sickness. Really, it was more accurate to call it a safeguard against immersion addiction. I’m no genius, but I always wondered how the corporate suits who put together all these fantasy-empowerment games didn’t foresee that people would get addicted. If you could be an epic hero, a knightly champion, a mysterious wizard, a space marine, or even the lead of a romance story, if you could be almost perfect instead of perfectly flawed, why wouldn’t you want to stay in that dream forever? I know I did.

  Up through the deep-dive, the zero-gravity feeling shifted into a relentless pull-up, harder and harder. This was always the worst part, the stomach-twisting sensation of return. The more you dived, the worse it was, yet another reason for the great logout timer. As your mind broke the top layers of the deep-dive network, gravity lurched into a downward spiral as your senses returned to your flesh-and-blood body. Nerve endings flash with new information, the big update on how your body has been doing the past few hours. For most people, it was a downer, going from powerful and unfettered to merely mortal.

  For me and others like me, it was a lot worse. I had to go from fully formed to crippled and broken.

  No, I’m not trying to get your pity. I’m simply being truthful. I don’t like it but I’ve mostly come to terms with it. My legs are crippled, both amputated at the knee after the car accident, and my right arm suffered from burns and nerve damage. Even after years of therapy, it refuses to work quite right. You’d think that with all the advances of science and medicine over the past century that this wouldn’t be a big deal, an easy fix, right?

  Sure, on paper it should be simple but like the person afflicted, every medical condition has its own unique wrinkles. The extent of the nerve damage and other complications make prosthetics a difficult fit for me, especially with the precarious financial situation my family was always in. I groaned as my body adjusted to the low-level pain that was my life. Instead of seeing the colorful, immersive net through my eyes, I was staring at the screens inside the NSAF helmet, sitting upright in my all too familiar wheelchair.

  To think, they used to call this ‘virtual reality’ back in the One-and-Twenty!

  “You almost got bumped out that time,” a soft if muffled woman’s voice chided me.

  I reached up with my good arm and fumbled with the helmet’s controls. Normally a NSAF helmet would be unconnected outside of the data cables to the console powering it, but mine was set on a motorized arm to make it easy for me to get on and off. The visor powered down and left me in darkness for a few moments as the arm whirred away, slowly lifting the helmet away.

  “I had a last-minute job, Roxanne,” I muttered. I hated the sound of my voice, a bit high-pitched and slightly nasally as opposed to the deep, powerful voice Shale possessed. Realistically, I was being petulant and judgmental; my voice wasn’t horrible or anything. It was jealousy and escapism talking, plain and simple.

  Blinking as my eyes adjusted to the soft lighting of my bedroom, the familiar sight of our live-in nurse greeted me. Though she was paid for by the Fontaine Institute, after the past five years, Roxanne (never Roxy) Fontaine was practically part of the family. At thirty-five, she was ten years older than me. She was tall, painfully thin, all angles and lines save for her soft face and bright smile. She took care of both my and my sister’s medical needs and generally helped around the house.

  “Well, I’m happy to hear that,” she said, pushing her red bangs out of her eyes. “Please try not to push yourself too hard, though. Things are tight, I know, but you need to think of your health first and foremost.”

  Rolling my bloodshot eyes, I rolled forward to meet her halfway. “The disability checks barely keep the essentials paid up. If it were just me, it’d be no big deal but there’s Chrissy …”

  Roxanne cut me off as she gently wiped my forehead with a damp, cool cloth. “I know you worry about your sister but to play devil’s advocate, who do you think will care for her if you’re gone? Foster homes and adoption never play out well for disabled children.”

  Scrubs were Roxanne’s daily attire, ranging through a wide variety of almost surreal pastel colors including a few electrochromatic ones that changed colors throughout the day. She also wore the medical equivalent of Batman’s utility belt, full of packs and pockets loaded with her day-to-day tools of the trade, which would have been a lot cooler if she weren’t using it to take care of two orphans. From that, she produced a bottle of eye-drops. The constant eye motion induced by the deep-dive state tended to dry the heck out of your eyes.

  “Can we not have this discussion for a couple of days?” I sighed as I manipulated my chair’s controls to angle back to help with her usual series of tasks for me post-dive. “It’s fun and all but I think we both need to get new material to spice it up.”

  She clucked her tongue as she carefully wet my eyes. “I suppose you’re right. It’s not like I’ve ever swayed you to do something wise in the past, have I?”

  “What can I say?” I muttered. “My stubbornness is part of my endearing charm.”

  My self-deprecation brought a laugh and a shake of Roxanne’s head. “Fine, Mr. Mule, maybe you’d at least acquiesce to dinner? It should be ready in about ten minutes. I just have to get Chrissy ready.”

  That would give me enough time to do a little banking, pay off some overdue bills. Yeah, sometimes the more things change, the more they stayed the same. Every century, mankind got all excited at the thought of advancement, that maybe in a decade we would get a post-scarcity society and everybody could do what they wanted in happy harmony. Sadly, here we were in the Three-and-Twenty and there were still power bills, food bills, medical bills, bill bills. While government assistance took care of many essentials, it was never enough.

  Life is a lot more like a MMO than most people are willing to admit. Your nose is always against the grindstone.
>
  “Okay, Roxanne,” I nodded as my chair whirred back to the upright position. “I’ll be out there.”

  She smiled softly and turned toward my bedroom door, the motion sensor in the door frame picking up her approach. The door slid open in near-silence.

  Right before she left the room, I spoke up. “Roxanne?”

  She stopped, her hand on the door frame as she glanced over her shoulder. “What is it, Max?”

  I forced myself to give a big smile. It was hard; smiles don’t come easily to me. “Thanks for everything. I don’t think I say that enough.”

  She beamed back at me and winked before disappearing out of the room, the door swishing closed behind her.

  My right arm might be weak but it worked well enough to operate the main chair controls. With a twist and a push of the main stick, I guided my epic mount over to the desk. My room, like the rest of the cost-subsidized house my family lived in, was a clean, neutral white color. The floors were covered in decade-old synthcarpet, still holding its off-beige color after all this time. Smart LED lights, currently set for Afternoon Sun ™, lit everything in even light. The furnishings were sparse (I brought my chair with me everywhere I went, after all) but between Roxanne and me, everything stayed pretty clean. I might be disabled but I was far from lazy!

  Stopping neatly in front of my recycled plastic desk, I leaned forward, tapping the power on for the monitor sitting atop it. Outside of that, the desk was almost bare. All the UI operations were done wirelessly through my wheelchair or through voice commands. I did keep a few choice pictures rotating through the video picture frame, glitchy as it could be sometimes. I had the last good picture of Mom, Dad, Chrissy, and me from about a month before the accident, one of me Chrissy, Roxanne, and I after all of that, and a few choice panoramas from Elementalis Online. Why not have some shots from the one place everything went right? Well, mostly right anyway.

  I spun my cursor across my crowded laptop. Chalk it up to my bad habit of leaving things on the desktop, but at least I knew where it all was. First up was hitting the ‘Net and a quick check of my bank account. The first half of Burndall’s player’s payment had already cashed out through EO’s secure accounts. Thank God for the brilliance of the EO developers to allow for proper in-game currency to real life currency exchanges. That alongside a few personal gold-to-cash transfers were keeping us on the plus side of things but that didn’t stop the month ahead from looking dire.

  Sighing, I swapped over to Excel 2.1k and stared at my budgetary spreadsheets. I had to somehow make these numbers work in some way that broke reality or find some other way to make ends meet. If I couldn't, we would lose this home and be shuffled off to the big assisted living facility on the edge of town. Chrissy and I would get separated to different dormitories and Roxanne would likely get reassigned back to her mother's institute. Unacceptable.

  Unfortunately, the cold, hard facts were that I was kind of a loser at life. At twenty-five, I had tried my hand at more than a few jobs, everything from customer service to tech support call centers. Nothing ever stuck. I might not be lazy, but I just couldn’t click with people outside of a deep-dive. Some of the counselors I’d had over the years chalked it up to everything from the loss of my parents to the stresses of having to raise my equally disabled sister.

  Me, I figured I was simply bad with people. I also wasn’t that fantastic at actual computer work despite being raised around them and I had no real talent at art. With physical labor completely off the board, there wasn’t much left I could do to make money.

  No, the only thing I was good at was gaming. Things seemed to click for me in the dive. It probably didn’t hurt that I had been one of the first people to ever be hooked up to a NSAF rig. It was supposed to be the ultimate in physical and psychological therapy. After all, what problems can’t you explore in a realm of endless possibility? That ability combined with EO’s currency exchange had enabled me to cobble things along since I reached the age of legal maturity until now, shoddy as it has been.

  Squinting at the numbers on the spreadsheet, I brought myself back to the present. How the heck was I going to keep us together? Nine minutes came and went in rapid order. I was about to give it all up and try to figure this out after dinner when my e-mail pinged.

  It was from the EO Update service. There had been rumblings of a content patch coming up; this was likely another promo hyping it up. Figuring I had another few minutes before Roxanna or Chrissy would start nagging me to eat,

  I popped the mail open and realized EO had potentially solved all my problems.

  Elementalis Online is a tremendous, thriving community, and we are proud to have millions of champions striving to quell the Elements of Conflict! You have fought through flaming forests, delved deep into crystal caves, braved ice-crusted peaks, and explored the depths of the ocean. That, champions, is just the start of your quests, for today, we announce the coming of the first Stronghold of Conflict, Crystalfire Keep, alongside a bevy of gameplay updates, bug fixes, and updates to make your journeys in Elementalis the greatest adventure of your life!

  Opening paragraph, Elementalis Online Patch 2.0 Notes

  The biggest issue we see on the developer end that impedes EO’s long-term health is the calcification of the metagame. As the overall gear level has risen and the rarest Gems have grown commonplace, there’s been a huge shift to overpowering encounters with raw damage, leaving some of the specialized support and tanking Classes and Gems being left by the wayside, not to mention the huge uptick of solo or very small groups tackling epic content. EO is a community as much as it is a game, and a community that doesn’t work together doesn’t last.

  Kyle Patruski, Elementalis Online’s lead developer, just prior to Patch 2.0

  3

  No one expected Patch 2.0 to hit when it did and not nearly so suddenly, but here it was. The announcement was right before my eyes. Servers worldwide were going down in fifteen minutes, making me extra glad we’d finished off Scorchie when we did. What caught my attention immediately after reading the opening bit were the prizes.

  The idea of any gaming company putting up money for prizes wasn’t exactly a new concept. Heck, go back to the Aught and Twenty and Atari’s Swordquest in the video game Stone Age if you want. Mostly, though, it had become something for e-sports tournaments or arena prizes. You know, competitive things, where winners and losers were obvious. The concept of handing out a pile of jingle for beating a boss first in the world or hitting a high score was long gone.

  Until now, anyway. K-Pat (our community’s loving/hateful nickname for EO’s lead developer) was going back in time. There was a series of prizes, real physical ones, lined up for Crystalfire Keep. Being the first big story content in a year or more, I guess they really wanted to snatch everyone’s attention, get all the players super-invested.

  I almost scoffed at it. It was neat they were offering all this but how could I expect to get any of it? Twenty levels (after I turned in that bounty) away from level cap, there was no way I would come anywhere close to even seeing Crystalfire Keep while any of this was going on. Even if I managed to grind out to level cap in time and traditionally, something that sounded so end-game was only accessible right after it went live for the most elite of the player base (i.e. not me).

  Still, the thought of a $250,000 grand prize for each grouped player for the first full clear made me salivate. Heck, even the lesser prizes were fine … $50,000 for being in the third bracket (completion in the 500 through 2,000 range) would solve some lingering problems. I couldn’t help myself—I read deeper.

  Rays of hope began to dawn on me. The prizes were dependent on server, so every one of the eighty-seven servers had their own loot to dole out. There was set to be a month-long lead-up to the actual emergence of the keep with a series of quests to seek out in Elementalis to lead up to the assault on the keep itself. If I really went nuts, I might be able to grind out a pile of levels, maybe even up to cap.

  But t
hat wouldn’t be necessary. There was one last, utterly unique wrinkle that those crazy geniuses at Elemental Studios had thrown into this patch. Elementalis Online was introducing scaling content, starting with Crystalfire Keep.

  Like the whole concept of completion prizes, scaling content was far from new. The idea was simple enough. Often, the avatars participating in the content would be scaled either up or down, with abilities, damage, and Health adjusted by a factor so that everyone participating was on a semi-equal footing. If the developers were feeling more ambitious, they could code the environment or dungeons so that the MOBs and challenges themselves scaled, the damage and effects scaling dynamically. Scaling content was all about accessibility, something that some elite players of these games never liked.

  As for me, even in the Three-and-Twenty, with progress marching forever onward, being disabled cut you off from a lot of the world. Oh, not in any conscious way (usually) but there’s still social stigmas and all the little hardships of getting around and meeting people. To say my social life was mostly dead outside of EO would be an understatement.

  In other words, I was all for accessibility this time, especially with the big prizes not being limited by level. Even knowing that, I had no illusions about that $250,000 payday. I didn’t have a guild, and while I had a solid reputation, it was entirely as a sellshield. I had no big raid experience to offer, and this was noted to be a series of ten-player encounters once you got to the Keep proper. Still, there would be a ton of people who had turned into mainly solo players who wanted to get into the place, a lot of people who would need a tank to get through the introductory quests and maybe even into the Keep itself.