“Oh, I actually put points into this!” Van shouted as he glanced at his Improv skill of +5. A menu of riddles appeared in front of him.
“Okay, I walk around in the morning, but fly away at night. I can’t read, but I know how to fight; what am I?” Van asked.
The jester looked at him blankly. The ground stopped moving and began to close back up.
“Is it a vampire?” the jester asked.
Van glanced at the menu. It gave the question, but he sure as hell didn’t know what the answer was.
“Sure,” Van replied.
“You have passed! Congratulations! You are now a bard of the highest caliber! Time is up! Go forth and delight the world with your skills!” the jester exclaimed as he took out a small, slender tube and handed it to Van.
Scroll of Hypnotic Power Acquired! said the item’s display. He looked at the stats.
Scroll of Hypnotic Power
Casting Time: 7 seconds
Effects: Causes all hostiles who are looking at you to fall into a trance and gain the Stunned condition for 5 minutes. The effects are cancelled if attacked.
“Nice!” Van said as he strolled out of the room. He was feeling pretty good about his bardly skills... or at least as good as he could feel with a character who was less optimized then an 8-year old’s first character.
As he emerged, he saw Sang exiting from the Map room.
“Hey, I said you didn’t have enough time for maps,” Van said, shaking his head at her.
“I finished eight of these. I had time for maps,” she replied sternly. There was no smile on her face, nor humor in her voice.
“Wait—eight? We barely had time for three or four!”
“Most of them followed a pattern; wasn’t hard to master,” Sang said impatiently as she glanced around. The lights on the walls were beginning to slowly dim and brighten at intervals, drawing her attention. “Hey, why are the lights glowing? Is it the Sea Cult?”
“No, it’s a Sleep Time reminder. Looks like we’ve been doing this for longer than I thought,” Van said, glancing at the in-game clock. It was nearly 3 AM. The lights went out from 3 to 8 every day.
“Oh, I see,” Sang said.
“We better find a bed and log out. We’ve got ten minutes before we’re kicked. Beds can add experience while we’re sleeping, so that’s good, at least.”
“Great... I look forward to getting out of this damn thing for a few hours,” Sang said as she started toward the stairs. “The beds are upstairs,” she added.
“How did you know?” he asked.
She looked at him with a dead, calculating stare. “I passed the maps tutorial.”
Van chuckled as they walked up the stairs and back onto the deck.
“Look at that!” Sang gasped as she glanced at the heavens. “The stars! My God, the stars!”
“Hmm?” Van mumbled as he looked up at the stars. There was nothing too interesting to see there. They were just stars.
“I have never seen anything so… so… intricate. Look at the constellations! Look at the way they make shapes!” she gasped.
“Never seen a star before, or…”
“Not a lot of stars in the city,” she replied, her voice full of awe. If anything, Van was impressed at the genuine sense of wonder in her voice. Maybe, just maybe, by the end of this, he could turn her into some kind of a gamer. That would be a great victory for the world, wouldn’t it?
“The massive constellation… it’s shaped like a dragon!” she muttered, eyes wide. Van looked up at the purple nebulae. He could see the outline of the Great Dragon Constellation, known to be the most beautifully designed of all star constellations. In the game lore, it had been a massive dragon that had died in the heavens, but which had been so beautiful that the gods decided to allow the body to become a collection of stars so that everyone could see her beauty for all of eternity. Of course, Van knew that some poorly paid graphic designer had sketched it all out, but he didn’t currently want to spoil anything for the agent.
“You know, I don’t really get dragons,” Sang said, never taking her eyes off of the sky.
“Yeah? What’s not to get? Big, scaly dragons with powerful jaws, fierce fighting skills, and intelligence to boot.”
“Well… will we get to see one?” she asked.
He could sense some genuine curiosity in her voice. He grinned and decided that he would share the great legend with her. “Some say… that there is an island,” he said, pointing to a distant island way off in the distance, “an island where dragon eggs can be found by the players. It takes a special quest and it’s very hard to do, but you could get a dragon egg and hatch it. Then you could raise it for your own and train it, and then eventually it’ll be big enough to ride.”
“Interesting. And you can fly on them?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard stories, and once I saw a player riding one a while back, but that was a long time ago. In reality, getting that quest is a pain. You gotta go through a whole song and dance to even make it to that island. Most people lose interest or don’t survive the journey.”
Sang looked at the island and back at Van. “Why don’t we go right now? Why can’t we make the ship go that way?”
“Short answer: the game is kind of on rails until we finish the first major quest. Long answer: it’s a very specific quest to get to that island and it’s not that easy to get to the quest.”
“Well, I’d like to go and get—” Her words were interrupted by a sudden blinking in his vision. Bright red words appeared. SLEEP TIME IS APPROACHING. PREPARE TO BE EJECTED.
“Ah crap, get to bed!” he shouted as he took off at a dead run for the bunks. He didn’t want to miss out on that sweet, sweet XP bonus.
He felt his boots thump, thump, thump toward the door and then, suddenly, he was lying in the pod. The shock was intense, and he felt himself shake awake. There were several tubes running fluids into his arms. It took him a second to realize that he was back in the real world. The difference between real life and being inside of the haptic pod was hardly noticable.
The pod whooshed as it opened up. He sat up and stretched his arms and legs, taking a deep breath. He felt a little worn out from everything, but otherwise felt relatively fine.
“Calm down! Calm down!” shouted one of the nurses as she wrestled with Sang. The agent was screaming hysterically and thrashing about. Van watched for a moment and then shook his head. She was such a noob. Couldn’t even handle the shift from VR to reality. He scoffed as he stood up and stretched a bit.
Eventually, the staff managed to calm Sang down, and then they escorted the two to their respective rooms. The doctor was waiting for Van by his door.
“Sup, Doc?” Van asked.
“Twenty minutes of walking on the treadmill; take your vitamins; then sleep,” the doctor said as he shook his head at Van. “This is an enforced policy.”
“Why?”
“It’ll keep you healthy… or, well, at least from getting worse,” the doctor said. “These haptic pods are a little worse because of the way you interact with them; you don’t really move around like the body should, so you’re going to decay muscles at an accelerated rate. Got it?”
“Sure, sure,” Van said as he yawned. He was starting to feel the fatigue kick in. He stretched a little bit more, took some vitamin pills from the doctor, and went into his room. He glanced at the big treadmill and rolled his eyes. He had managed to avoid exercise his entire life, and he wasn’t about to start now. Instead, he waited a few minutes before leaving his room and finding his way to where Sang was staying.
Her door was open. “Knock, knock!” he called out as he stuck his head into her room. She was sitting on the bed and looking down at a tablet computer, mumbling to herself.
“Just popping in to say hey, hope you weren’t too psychologically scarred from the sudden transition from falseness to reality,” Van said.