“Pizza, chicken wings, and Chinese food?” Misha cut in, holding a massive plate of food in both of her hands as she carefully walked from the kitchenette to the table everyone was seated at, trying not to spill anything from her pile. “Yes, yes, we did.”
“Mish, that plate’s bigger than you are…” Peter trailed off as the petite woman gave him a dangerous look.
“Choose your next words carefully, Peter.”
“Uh…” Peter coughed. “Bon appetit?”
Misha’s expression smoothed into a smile as she sat down at the table. “Good boy. There’s hope for you yet.”
Quickly shedding my winter jacket and hanging it in the closet, I fixed myself a plate and found a place at the table, Peter following close behind me.
“So, how’d it go?” Deckard asked us eagerly, causing everyone to turn their attention towards Peter and me. “Are we rich yet?”
“Well…” Peter began, drawing the word out for an unnecessarily long time, eventually prompting Heron to swat him on the arm.
“Quit it, you troll!” Heron grunted while waving a half-eaten pizza slice in my direction. “Let Marc tell it if you’re just going to screw with us.”
“But he has no sense of showmanship!” Peter complained, mockingly rubbing his arm in pain.
“A business report doesn’t need showmanship,” Zach added dryly.
“Of course, it does! Everything does!”
“We’re doing really great,” I said, shaking my head at Peter’s antics as I began to explain the results of our meeting. Everyone stared at me intently as I outlined our success and the steps Peter and I had taken to make Virtus an actual business entity in the Real World.
“But that’s not all either!” I teased as I wrapped up the day’s events. “We’re also going to be on GameTV tonight at nine! They’re airing our entire series for everyone to watch!”
“That’s amazing!” Misha shouted as the rest of the group broke out in cheers. “This is better than we could have hoped for!”
“We have to watch it!” Deckard said, clearly sharing the same sentiment that Peter had expressed in the hallway earlier.
“We’ll also have to update Freya and the rest of the guild members,” Misha told me, before cocking her head in thought. “And I’ll have to get some of their real names too. I’ve been so dialed in lately, I can’t believe I never bothered to ask.”
“It’s easy to forget about Reality when we’re in Ascend Online,” I told Misha. “Makes me wonder if they designed it that way on purpose.”
“Maybe,” Misha replied with a shrug. “Could just be how our brain tries to make sense of it all.”
“Could be,” I agreed before a slight frown crossed my face. “Wish they did a better job of helping us reconcile appearances though… my brain has been struggling pretty badly at getting used to how you all look again. I keep expecting to see you all either as your in-game avatars, or your pre-VR diet appearances.”
“I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one struggling with that,” Misha said slowly, running a hand through her short blonde hair. “I’ve found that slowing down and really looking at the person helps. It’s the quick glances out of the corner of my eye that always causes me to scare myself, thinking that there’s a stranger beside me.”
Nodding slowly, I decided to give Misha’s advice a shot and took a closer look at the friend I had known for nearly twenty-five years. At first, I didn’t feel anything different, my mind still feeling as if there was something subtly ‘wrong’ with the person sitting before me. But the longer I looked, I started to see the familiar features that comprised my mental image of Misha.
Short blonde hair framed a face of obvious Slavic descent, a pair of green eyes accenting the already sharp features that had been magnified by the effects of the VR Diet. A familiar scar just under Misha’s eye caught my attention, one that brought back memories of a playground mishap from ages past.
Something clicked in my brain as I refamiliarized myself with her appearance, leaving me nodding and feeling a little better about my mental state.
“Yeah, I can see that helping,” I said slowly. “So how did the rest of the day work out after we left?”
“Pretty good overall, I guess,” Misha replied with a non-committal shrug. “We got the tent up without any real issues and managed to get the Adventurers settled. Quite a few of them expressed interest in joining Virtus after our rather daring rescue this morning.”
“That’s great!” I said with a sigh of relief, mostly happy to hear that the town was still safe, but also excited to hear that we might have new applicants soon. “We’ll have to hold tryouts once we’re back online and see if any of them make the cut.”
“I think a handful of them will,” Misha said optimistically. “They’re almost all lower leveled, but a few might have that edge we’re looking for.”
When we created Virtus, we decided that we were going to try and be as selective as possible in our recruitment criteria. We wanted to retain and recruit members that we could truly rely on, and that they would be able to carry their own weight from both a combat and out of combat perspective. We couldn’t afford to have members that flinched in combat, and were afraid of getting hurt, or those who sat around and did nothing in their spare time. Our goal was to build a group of self-motivated individuals that would stand up for one another, no matter what the game world threw at us.
“We also got Marlin settled in,” Zach cut into the conversation with a wave of his dark-skinned hand, having been half listening to our conversation.
“Yeah? How’s he making out?” I shifted my glance to look at Zach, going through the same process I had just gone through with Misha to refamiliarize myself with his appearance.
“Great!” Zach replied with a confident nod, causing his wavy jet-black hair to bob in the air as he looked at me with dark-brown eyes. “We managed to get his cart stored in the crafting hall, well out of the way where anyone would easily trip over it. We piled a bunch of our stuff that we had in storage on top of his cart too, so it’s really unlikely that anyone’s going to go digging through it all.”
As Zach spoke, I couldn’t help but notice that the wiry Italian man had lost a rather substantial amount of weight, likely as much, if not more, than Peter had. It left his face overly lean looking, the scraggly beard he had growing doing little to fill it out. “Thanks for sorting all that out, Zach.”
“Hey, no problem at all!” he said excitedly, flashing a tooth-filled smile. “I’m excited to see what things we can come up with Alchemy-wise now that we have better tools to work with.”
“Me too!” I agreed, looking forward to a chance when I could craft relatively uninterrupted.
The rest of the evening flew by as we slowly unwound from the day’s events and collectively consumed a truly overwhelming amount of food; our bodies were desperately craving solid, non-intravenous nourishment. For me, it was the first meal I could remember eating in over a week, an experience I didn’t realize that I missed having. With my in-game avatar not needing food to survive, I almost never bothered to eat, always working on the next item on my never-ending to-do list or finding something that needed checking on.
I was actually lost in thought, mentally reviewing that very ‘to do list’, while cleaning up after our epic feast, when Deckard’s massive hand came down on my shoulder and pulled me back into the moment.
“Got a minute, Marc?” he asked, thumbing his other hand at Heron who was standing just behind him. “We have something to fill you in on.”
“Yeah, sure.” I tossed the towel I was holding down on the counter and turned around, craning my head upwards at Deckard’s giant frame.
Well, at least there’s a little bit of familiarity here, I thought, watching Deckard awkwardly shift himself to the side to allow Heron enough room to step into the tiny kitchenette. Built like a brick house, the VR Diet had probably had the least amount of impact on Deckard when compared to the rest of the
group, only serving to further accent his already muscular form.
Finding a comfortable position leaning against the counter, Deckard ran a hand over his cleanly shaved head and fixed Heron with his steel blue eyes. “Alright, Heron. Tell him the same thing you told me.”
Thankfully I was able to keep my head relatively level as I shifted my glance from Deckard over to Heron, the two of them being reasonably similar in height, if not body size. Where Deckard had a muscular and fit appearance, Heron was rail thin, appearing as if a stiff wind would be able to sweep him off his feet. Even more so now that the VR Diet had trimmed the little fat that had managed to somehow cling to Heron’s overly lean body.
“Okay,” Heron started slowly, uncharacteristically fiddling with a pop can in his hand. “So, I’ve noticed something with the new Adventurers.”
“Oh?” I asked, curiosity blooming across my face. With how quickly Peter and I left after sorting out accommodations with Léandre, I’d barely had a chance to look at, let alone talk with any of the new Adventurers that we had rescued from the bandits.
“Well, first of all, I think the majority of them are really new to the game,” Heron replied. “And I mean that they’re still within the first or second cycle of play, so they haven’t learned to be careful about what they let slip.”
“They must be part of the second wave of players, after they added more pods,” I commented with a nod.
“Yeah, I think so too. Anyway though, after talking with a bunch of them, I got the impression that bandit issues like we’ve faced today are pretty commonplace as soon as you leave Coldscar, if not as large a group,” Heron continued, a nervous look creeping over his face. “Soon as you’re outside the city limits, you’re pretty much on your own, and if you’re not travelling in a large group, chances are you’re going to be going for a respawn before the day’s out.”
“Damn, it’s gotten that bad?” I could hear the disbelief in my voice.
“Oh, you think that’s bad? I’m just getting started.” Heron grunted pessimistically as he shook his head, causing his dark, shoulder-length hair to swish side to side. “Pretty much every resource, be it a mine, forest, quarry or something that can be collected and used in crafting is either claimed by a guild or is being actively fought over by guilds.”
“Oh, damn,” I echoed a second time, inwardly wincing at Heron’s news. “So, it’s basically a free for all out there.”
“Yeah,” Heron agreed. “But here’s the icing on the cake. No one seems to care.”
“What do you mean?” I cocked my head, not quite understanding what Heron was referring to.
“No one seems to care that the Adventurers are fighting! It’s a complete shit show everywhere, with Guilds scrambling for whatever power they can get. From what I’ve been told, the Eberian Military is letting the Adventurers do pretty much anything they want, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the development of Coldscar.”
“Which tells me that the Military is busy dealing with something else that needs their full attention, which is likely the Holy Ascendency of Eligos,” Deckard added. “Otherwise, they would be putting a stop to all the infighting between the Guilds.”
“I’m surprised it hasn’t broken out into a larger conflict, to be honest,” Heron said, looking at the two of us with a grim expression. “You know that’s how it’ll end up. Maybe not soon, but eventually, someone’s going to propose an alliance, and they’re going to get enough people on board, after that…”
“Things will snowball, then escalate,” I replied, completely agreeing with Heron. “Though what I want to know, is why did these Adventurers come out this way then? Seems like they would have enough opportunities filling the power vacuums that are forming and joining up with one of the guilds. Why go out to the frontier?”
“Do you think they know something we don’t?” Deckard queried, crossing his arms over his chest while looking at me. “We really haven’t had enough time to filter through all the settlers that arrived today. Maybe it’s a simple case of just wanting to get away from the Player Versus Player combat?”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “Thinking about it though... Aldford isn’t really in a strategically viable place, at least not in the short term. We’re what, a four or five-day march to Coldscar? That’s well off the beaten path.”
“That’s true too.” Deckard rubbed the side of his face thoughtfully. “There’s hardly enough of us out this way for anyone to worry about. I mean, even if all of the new settlers and Adventurers join Aldford, that’ll only put us at about three hundred strong. Compared to the thousands of Adventurers that must have spawned in Eberia, in addition to NPCs, and even distant Adventurers that spawned within the Ascendancy.”
“We’re small fry.” I breathed a small sigh of relief at the thought. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that we would completely be left alone if a major conflict broke out between the Adventurer guilds, or even Eberia and the Ascendancy, but we would definitely be a low priority.
“Maybe,” Heron agreed, despite the worried look on his face. “But I’m concerned that one of the bigger guilds near Coldscar might decide to give up, or get driven out towards us. They may not be inclined to play nice.”
“Nothing we can really do about that,” Deckard grunted. “We have no easy way of keeping watch on Coldscar from five days away.”
“The best thing we can do is to keep working on Aldford.” I motioned for the guys to make their way out into the rest of the common room. “But while we’re talking about this, we might as well take advantage of our time off to throw some plans around.”
“For what exactly?” Heron asked turning back to look at me as we walked out of the room.
“Survival.”
Chapter 6
Sunday, March 10th, 2047 - 6:57 am
Aldford – The Foundry
As I logged back into Ascend Online, I felt my incorporeal body floating through nothingness, my vision swirling with a kaleidoscope of colors with a single line of text floating directly in front of me.
Loading, please wait…
Gradually, I felt my virtual self take shape as memories began flooding into my consciousness. In the span of seconds, I lived through another day, suddenly experiencing everything that my Avatar had done while I had been offline.
Images of weaving filtered through my mind as I remembered myself helping sew and adjust the rough squares of burlap that we had stored away in the Crafting Hall. The memories then shifted forward to when I helped set up the massive tent, working on whatever task that Léandre needed help completing. Then suddenly again, I found myself back in the Crafting Hall, carefully refining countless leather hides and bronze ingots.
My vision finally cleared as I completed the login process and found myself standing alone in the sweltering heat of the Foundry, dressed in a simple linen shirt and leather pants, having interrupted my Avatar in the middle of refining bronze ingots. A quick glance around me showed me that my armor was hanging from a rack nearby. Wiping a beat of sweat off my forehead, I noticed a system message appear in the corner of my vision.
Welcome back to Ascend Online! While you were offline, one or more of your skills have increased! Please check your Character Sheet for more details!
Oh, sweet! I gained a level in something! I mentally cheered as I dismissed the prompt, and opened my Character Sheet for what seemed to be the first time in ages, the information filling my vision. I can’t even remember the last time I took a solid look at my stats. Probably not since I hit level thirteen last week!
Lyrian Rastler – Level 13 Spellsword
Human Male (Eberian)
Statistics:
HP: 726/726
Stamina: 660/660
Mana: 640/640
Experience to next level: 19287/27000
Attributes:
Strength: 53 (55)
Agility: 43 (49)
Constitution: 40
Intelligence: 48
Wi
llpower: 18
Abilities:
Sneak Attack II (Passive) – Attacks made before the target is aware of you automatically deal weapon damage+35.
Power Attack II (Active: 50 Stamina) – You slash viciously at the target putting extra strength behind the blow. Deal weapon damage+25.
Kick (Active: 20) – You kick your enemy for 10-20 points of damage, and knock them back 1-2 yards. Depending on your Strength/Agility score, you may also knock down the target.
Shoulder Tackle (Active: 40 Stamina) – Stun enemy for 1-2 seconds with chance to knock enemy down based on Strength and/or Agility attribute.
Unarmed Mastery I (Passive) – All Unarmed attack damage is increased by 12.
Skills:
Magic:
Evocation – Level 13 – 56%
Alteration – Level 13 – 88%
Conjuration – Level 13 – 71%
Abjuration – Level 13 – 42%
Weapons:
Unarmed Combat – Level 13 – 21%
Swords – Level 13 – 75%
Axes – Level 11 – 35%
Daggers – Level 12 – 73%
Other:
Stealth – Level 11 – 12%
Legacy of the Fallen Page 6