“This is not a dream.”
I repeated to myself for the nth time, lying on my back, staring up at the sky.
“It’s been four days, I haven’t woken up yet. This is not a dream. This is real.”
All around me were the sound of footsteps trampling to and fro the city square. Throngs of NPCs wandered through the open air courtyard, accompanied by the occasional armed characters with user labels floating above their heads. The ones in this general area didn’t have the Ethereal Cape equipped, neither did they have the Chosen One badge, yet they still gawked at me as hard as the NPCs did as they walked past.
“How long are you going to lie there, Luck?”
I tilted my head to see LarkspurXX, Marge, as she told me to call her, marching up to me, her expression filled with the reckless determination you’d have to muster up when trying to reason with a nutjob. Looking at the circumstances, the nutjob was probably me, and she was here to tell me to stop lying on the ground in the middle of the market like a creep.
“It’s been four days, Marge,” I stared at her. “I haven’t eaten for four days. How am I still not hungry?”
“Luck-"
“I haven’t gotten up for four days, but I don’t feel stiff. I haven’t slept for four days, but I don’t feel tired. I haven’t drunk water for four days, how- how am I still alive?”
“Luck, please, just-”
“Am I dead? Did I die in my sleep? Is this secretly hell disguised to look like Briarwood Rebirth as my punishment for spending too much time on games?” I babbled. “I’m sorry, I’ll work hard. I’ll talk to the stupid clients. I’ll do the paperwork. Maybe I’ll log in once a week to look at Rosa but that’s it. I’ll stop. I’ll work all nighters if you want me to, I’m sorry.”
Marge sighed. She’d been sighing a lot ever since I met her. Maybe it was because I was being problematic. I knew I was being problematic, but somehow, my logical side had turned itself off and went into hibernation, leaving only my damaged ego screaming inside my head.
“Well, at least you’re not throwing a tantrum anymore,” she muttered under her breath, then crouched down to stare at me. “Look, you can’t just lie there forever. I mean, you can, but that’s beside the point. Just know that when you get up, you should try opening up the Help menu with voice commands. It’ll tell you how to access all the functions you had while playing the game version.”
“And if you change your mind about being a log,” she said a little more hopefully. “Feel free to send an application to the Chosen Ones’ Alliance. We pool our resources in the Guild Treasury and help each other out with levelling and getting items. We’re all in the same boat, after all.”
I said nothing, so after a while, she just shook her head and left.
Why did this happen? I found my thoughts wandering towards the same topic I’d been thinking about for the past four days. It seemed so long ago that I had been holed up in my room in a small flat playing Briarwood Rebirth, my flatmate and old friend, Johan shuffling about the shared kitchen in those ugly bunny slippers of his. That I’d been sitting in a metal cubicle at my most recent workplace, filling in tiny Exel boxes with information from the ever growing piles of paper stacked on my desk. That I’d been staring remorsefully at the pitiful number in my bank account, lamenting to myself that, even if I did manage to get married, I’d never have the financial ability to be the dad I always wanted to try being. Everything that I had done in my life, every good idea and stupid decision that I had made, suddenly felt very trivial. So what happens now, if I’m really in another world? Is my body mine? Or is my real body just in the other world rotting for who knows how many days. If I took my body with me, then how long would it be before someone over there reported my absence to the cops? And how long would it be before the cops gave up on finding me and filed me away as dead? I can’t stay here, my boss will fire me, and I’ll be unemployed again. What about my taxes, all the bills I have to pay? Johan’s paying half, what about my half? Do I get insurance if I go missing? Will I be able to get my hands on that insurance? Will someone who knew me just open up Briarwood Rebirth and see me online 24/7 while being officially dead? I’d have a lot of explaining to do if I ever do get back.
I wanted to go back, and at the same time I didn’t. This was an RPG game, a game where the main goal was fighting, fighting and more fighting. I didn’t want to fight to level up, I got a C in physical education in my grade school days. If this was the game, that would mean I’d respawn if I died, but I didn’t want to try dying either. If I don’t fight, then I don’t level up. If I don’t level up, I can’t get stronger. And if I can’t get stronger, I’d probably get one hit KO’d in the occasional raid events where The Decay just flicks a finger and sends a raid boss rampaging through a random town. I could run, but without levelling up my speed stat, could I really run anywhere? Some of the raid bosses were pretty fast-
“Misterrrr? What are you doing on the floor?”
There was a little girl standing next to my head, one chubby finger pointed in my direction, her round eyes wide with curiosity. She crouched down, her head tilted, and poked my cheek with said finger.
“Hello? Mister?”
“Go away, munchkin, can’t you see I’m thinking?”
“About what?”
“About the universe, the cosmos. The meaning of life. My paycheck. It’s adult stuff, too complicated for kids like you to understand.”
“You don’t look like a grown up.”
I turned my head to stare down at my hand lying by my side. Yep. It was tiny. If I was wrong about hell, and this really was Briarwood Rebirth, then it was probably because my level was too low after having my character reset. I probably looked like a kid of 10 years old or something, and would probably continue to look like that until I levelled up or bothered to use Glamour to hide my appearance. The aging mechanic had always been weird, but now that I looked at this “other world” possibility, you’d probably have to age in one way or another.
“I am. I’m just pretending to be a kid. I’m hiding from my responsibilities.”
“Hiding?” the kid stuck her thumb in her mouth, then plopped down next to me. “I’m good at hiding.”
“Good for you.”
She lay down on her back, imitating me, and stared up at the sky.
“Now what?”
“Now we stay very very quiet, and we don’t talk.”
“Okay,” she whispered, and fell silent. After a few seconds, she turned and whispered to me.
“Wassa paycheck?”
Hmph, so much for quiet.
“It’s when someone asks you to do something and promises you something else in advance. Then after you do the thing for some time, they give you the thing you wanted.”
“The thing and the thing?”
“Ugh, forget it.”
The kid continued chattering away in loud whispers next to me, her eyes flicking back and forth at all the people going about the market square, her train of thought so sporadic that I could hardly keep up with it. First she talked about apples, then about rocks, then about that man in the hat, why is his hat so funny, are you really a grown up, you sound like my Dada. Soon, I found myself swept along in her flow, her nonsensical chatter momentarily easing my worries and letting me relax. It was odd really, how talking to some dumb kid was doing more good to my confused head than the other Chosen Ones and Rosa did. It wasn’t that Marge and Trix were bad, really, it was just that they were a bit… intense. Reminding me about what I should and shouldn’t do, filling my head with information on the situation, asking me to join the guild as another pair of hands… It was a lot to take in. They just went on and on, like a fast current running downhill, so much to process that I didn’t really have the time to take it all in before my tiny pea sized brain imploded on itself.
The kid went on and on too, but in a different way from the rest. The things she talked about were random, unimportant ponderings that flitted from topic to topic in the incohesive way only children would think in. It was relaxing in a way, being able to talk about unimportant things without having my mind screaming about all the trouble I’d have to go through to get back and all the trouble I’d have to go through to stay. It gave me space, space to shut up the screaming ego of mine, take it apart and reorganise my thoughts about the whole thing. Whether I wanted to stay, what I would do if I stayed, or whether I wanted to try to find a way out.
Trying to find a way out. That was what Marge and the rest of guild members of the Chosen Ones’ Alliance had been doing for the past few years, from what they’d told me. They’d tried looking in every dungeon for some kind of clue that might help them, in every building, structure and cave. They tried using Overpower on all the important NPCs, including Rosa and both Faerie Courts, (I still had to look into what exactly that “Tier 11” skill did) but nobody knew anything. They’d even tried interrogating The Decay, presumably since he was usually the one causing trouble in Briarwood Rebirth, but Marge concluded that he knew nothing. Some of the other members in the guild weren’t quite as easily convinced, however.
The Chosen Ones’ Alliance had over a hundred members, and there were a couple more that hadn’t joined the guild and struck out on their own. If even a hundred people, some of whom were most definitely smarter and more capable than I, had failed, then my contribution in the search probably wouldn’t help unearth any new information. I was better off focusing on levelling and waiting for the smart ones to find the trail back home. Who knew, maybe a maxed out fighter would come in handy for completing whatever challenge might stop us from going home. As for whether I wanted to go home or not, well, that was a decision I could make when the choice became available.
Since I would be staying here for a while, what would I do? From my past four days, I’ve found out that I could live, simply by lying there on the ground. Not needing to eat, not needing to sleep, just lying there, like a log, until someone told me to get out of the way. Maybe I could find a convenient nook to start lying down in, somewhere out of the way of monsters and other users. Then just lie there and count the days until Marge or someone else from the Chosen Ones’ Alliance came to find me.
…
That sounded boring as heck, no.
What did I do in my spare time back in the other world? The answer came easily. Playing Briarwood Rebirth. And what did I do in Briarwood Rebirth? Flirt with Rosa, fight in the PVP Arena, attempt to 100% complete the game.
Rosa. She was as lovely and perfect as always, but somehow, I felt that she wasn’t the Rosa I loved anymore. I’d only spoken to her for a brief while, after I’d just gotten here, but I could tell that there was something missing, something that had previously made me like her so much. The way she held herself, the way she walked and talked, there seemed to be a sort of veil about her. A sort of hardness in her eyes, like an unshakable tower or unbreakable barrier. Yeah, that was it. Her kind words and kindness, they felt false, a thin veil hiding her real thoughts and feelings. There was no… sincerity behind them, not like from back when this was just a game. It was as if she were lying through her teeth the whole time, pretending to be as delicate and lovely as she was supposed to be. Yet the hardness in her eyes and the firmness in her grip gave it away. This Rosa was perfect, just like the other Rosa, but she wasn’t as sincere and thoughtful. She was determined, stubborn, and most probably perfect in her own way, but she just wasn’t my Rosa.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
So that was flirting off the list. After lying there for four days with few feelings of yearning for this Rosa, I probably didn’t love her anymore.
The PVP Arena was off the list too. I currently didn’t have the levels or enough familiarity with how to use the skills to be able to fight against players with a keyboard and godly APM. Maybe some other day. After all, the PVP Arena was a good place to earn a fuckton of cash.
As for 100% completion… I thought back to my old account, grinding dungeons and quests to try to get all the possible equipment, weapons and accessories. Trying to fulfill stupidly hard combo requirements to get a 100% drop on an SSR weapon, grinding the same dungeons hundreds of times to get an R accessory to drop. It was tedious, but fun in a way. A bit like treasure hunting, in which you went to all the obscure places normal players wouldn’t bother going to top off the blank spaces in your collection. If I could secure a house in this world, I could restart my equipment hunts. Go exploring. All the grinding would give me all the exp I needed to level up to a safe level, and if I wanted, I could always quit and go back to being a log on the market floor. I thought of a room filled from the ceiling to the floor with displays of all the glorious armour Briarwood Rebirth had to offer. It looked good. Yeah, that would be fun to try.
It was at that point that I noticed the nonstop chatter beside me had ceased. When I turned my head, I found that the kid’s eyes had closed, her breathing regular, a goofy smile spread across her face as she slept. Talked until she knocked herself out huh? I wish I could sleep.
“New friend?” a shadow fell over me as I heard someone approach.
I glanced up.
“Oh. Hi, Rue. She’s just some random kid who decided to chat.”
“You seem better,” Rue was wearing some sort of heavy cloak with a hood that cast most of his face in shadow. If not for his voice, that sort of low hum that masked hints of fatigue, it would have been difficult to recognise him. He tilted his head to look at the sleeping kid, before turning back to me. “Rosa told me that you were… a bit unstable after Larkspur and Trixnoct confronted you.”
“Yeah. I feel a bit less jumbled up,” I sat up and shook my head to clear out my thoughts. “Marge and Trix just tried to speed things along too much for me to process.”
“That’s good,” He seemed relieved. “What are your plans for now?”
… Great question. I had a goal, but no plan of action.
“I don’t know… I want to start my equipment collection again, but that’s all I’ve got so far,” I admitted.
“You… don’t want to find a way back to your world? Usually, that’s the Chosen Ones’ first priority after they get here, along with…” he stopped abruptly, and muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like a long chain of cursing.
“I mean, yeah, but if Marge has been at it for five years and found nothing, I don’t think I’ll be able to think of any possibilities she hasn’t explored. Might as well enjoy myself while I can.”
“I see… Given your initial response, you’re surprisingly calm about all this.”
“I’m done freaking out. I’ve reached tranquility. I’ve achieved Nirvana. Life just be like that.”
“A-alright. Anyway, if you want to collect equipment, I’d suggest that you complete the tutorial quests to gain EXP and level up to Level 15 for a Class Change,” his voice tensed. “At that point, you should be able to clear the Fortress of Ruin limited event dungeon easily. You’ll be able to get the limited drop equipment now instead of having to wait for the next Chosen One to come along.”
“Oh that’s right, there’s still the event.”
The event. I’d completely forgotten about the event. It was a limited time event spanning over a period of 2 months that happened after a player cleared the final boss to story mode. Since so few players actually went to attempt it, and even fewer bothered trying till they won, the game developers designed this limited time event as a celebration for all the players. The story behind it was that after the player who cleared the final boss sealed away The Decay, The Decay’s home, the Fortress of Ruin fell into disarray. Reanimated boss monsters previously under his rule were weakened due to no longer being tapped into The Decay’s immense Ruin power, and the originally orderly structure of the dungeon was destroyed. Champions from all over Briarwood would come to the Fortress of Ruin to claim whatever treasures The Decay had left behind, and kill the now simple and predictable boss monsters in the dungeon. What was supposedly a high level guild raid dungeon was downgraded to a low level, soloable dungeon that provided ridiculously high tier drops and equipment at a higher drop rate. Even the boss monsters that had been downgraded from Level 90 to Level 10 still provided the same amount of EXP you’d gain from killing the Level 90 version, making it a good opportunity for players to grind levels and get some decent equipment. There were secret rooms, treasure caches, and you could bash down all the walls in the dungeon if you wanted. The only room you couldn’t access or bash the walls down of was the final boss room, the place where The Decay was said to be sealed. The idea behind it was essentially the game developers trying to convince the players that clearing the final boss wasn’t that much of a disaster as everyone made it out to be. If you got a whole bunch of advantages in levelling and gaining equipment after your character was reset, why not clear the final boss fight? Well, that hooked some people. Most players didn’t change their mind even after the announcement of the event. It wasn’t as if the equipment at the Fortress of Ruin was the best, most overpowered equipment ever. It was good, but not amazing, and there were better dungeons with better loot. Not worth losing everything you’d worked for.
The last time the event had been up was two months ago, when a Level 100 Brownie, Hana4U, cleared the final boss. I’d been online when the announcement was publicised in global chat, accompanied by a lot of emoji spamming. That player was a pretty well known online artist who drew very nice fanart for the game. I used to follow her on her social media to look at some of the art she drew of Rosa. She drew a lot of Rosa, after all, everyone liked Rosa. She went on an unannounced hiatus shortly after clearing the final boss, and everyone, myself included, were somewhat sad about it. Well, now I know where she went.
“I guess I’ll do just that. The event sounds like a good opportunity to try to get the Ironfell and Mothwing Flight equipment sets,” I tried to stand up, before tripping something slippery and falling back down again. Ah yes, as expected, the Ethereal Cape had been the culprit of my sudden fall, the glossy, shiny fabric winding around my ankles, presumably happened during the four days that I was sulking. Wretched thing, always getting in the way of my legs. When I got my hands on the Status menu, I’d be taking that thing off.
“You could use Glamour, you know. Make yourself taller so at least it won’t drag on the ground,” Rue’s tired voice had taken on an annoyingly amused tone as he looked down at me.
“Wipe that smile off your face, beanpole. It’s not like I have a tab key I can press to bring up Settings,” what did Marge say to do if I needed to look at controls? The Help menu? With voice command?
“Help menu,” I announced to thin air, and right in front of my eyes, a translucent screen unfolded to form the familiar interface of the Help menu.
79 pages? Fuck no.
I looked to Rue for assistance, but he only shook his head.
Fine. Help menu it is.
I skimmed through the pages at my top reading speed, my eyes glancing over each line briefly before moving on. Glamour… Glamour… Ah, there it was.
[Glamour
Rarity N (Base skill)
Passive Off
INT Requirement N/A
MP Requirement MP limit reduced by 5% to 50% depending on degree of edits
Range Caster
Cooldown N/A]
[Skill Description:
A skill that all Faeries possess. Allows the caster to change their appearance, age or sex. User class and stats are not affected by different appearances other than MP, in which the maximum MP the caster can use will be limited due to the taxing effect of Glamour. The farther the illusion strays from the original, the greater the maximum MP deduction penalty. The MP deduction penalty effect will be lessened or terminated if a Glamour loadout with greater similarity is used or if Glamour is turned off.]
[Technicalities:
To activate Glamour to show the most recently edited loadout, use the voice command “Use Skill Glamour”. To access the customisation menu, use the voice command “Glamour Customise Loadout {number}”. There are options to make general edits: age, sex, race, class (Note: User will not gain class specific stats or skills that are not relevent to their original class if Glamour is used to imitate the features of a different class), height, stature, hair colour, hair length, eye colour. There is an option to use the loadout of other users or NPCs as long as the user has seen the loadout before. There is the advanced edit option, where the user may remould the Glamour from scratch.]
Blah blah blah. Basically, it was the same as the game version, except it functioned on voice commands instead of having you access it through the Settings menu. Usually, players had already customised their character to look the way they wanted it to at the start of the game, so the advanced edit function mostly lay untouched. Maybe a bit of hair shortening here and there, a change in eye colour perhaps, small edits like that, nothing too drastic. After all, not being able to use as much of your Mana Points as you would have been able to without Glamour was rather problematic for most players. The biggest changes players made when using Glamour were usually to offset the aging mechanic. It wasn’t as if the character got uglier the older they got, in fact, they looked like very fit, very dashing badass grandpas and grandmas. It was just that not a lot of people appreciated being a badass grandpa ingame, myself included.
“Glamour Customise Loadout 1,” I recited, and another translucent screen popped up, this one with a rotatable image of my current character, who turned out eerily similar to how I looked 20 or so years ago, along with a lot of text boxes for appearance edits. I waved away the accursed help screen and set the character age to 32. The character in the display box shot up in height, obtained a pair of round glasses and gained a small bit of stubble (I’d always bemoaned the fact that my genes weren’t good enough to give me the sexy full beards my old classmates went around sporting), until it was almost as if I were looking in a mirror. Well, in a mirror, if this was me back in the other world.
I tapped the save button on the screen, waved it away in a similar fashion to what I had done to the Help menu, and stood up again, this time a bit more carefully to make sure the Ethereal Cape didn’t trip me up. If I had understood the Help menu correctly…
“Use Skill. Glamour.”
[Glamour Activated.]
[Your max MP has been reduced by 10%]
All of a sudden, I was viewing the world from a much more comfortable height, a new yet familiar weight settled on the bridge of my nose. My hands had gone from tiny back to their usual size, and the Ethereal Cape was… well, the edges of it hung about an inch off the ground, but at least it wasn’t dragging on the floor as a deadweight anymore. I looked back at Rue.
Rue was still taller than me.
Damnit.
“Well that definitely feels better,” I muttered. “So, beanpole. Where do I go to get the tutorial quests? It’s been 15 years since I last had to do them, I’m not sure I still know the way.”
“I don’t know about that either... You see, Rosa usually handles all the Champions,” Rue added hurriedly. Maybe I was making a bad expression. “I just know that it’s somewhere in the Inner City, but I can’t go in there, so I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else who can take you.”
“Inner City… Oh yeah, that place. It’s the one that’s got those big walls that supposedly stop The Decay from going in personally - ” I saw Rue flinch again. “What? Are you okay? You seem pretty on edge.”
“No. I’m fine. Just… surprised, I suppose. I thought you were aware.”
“Well, I’ve always been running my ass through the dungeons and doing all the trading I need with travelling merchants. It’s not like I have any reason to visit the newbie place.”
“Not that- Nevermind,” he pulled his hood lower over his face. “We’re in the Outer City of the Capital at the moment. There should be a teleporter somewhere in this town that will take you directly to the Wall, else you’ll have to walk through a couple more scattered towns to get there.”
He moved as if to leave, but then stopped and turned back.
“Actually, please wait a moment,” he did a swiping motion, and a series of translucent screens floated up in front of him. He didn’t have to use voice commands? Well, maybe it was an NPC thing, but I made a mental reminder to skim the Help menu for non vocal commands later.
He spent a few seconds tapping away at the screens, before nodding to himself.
There was a ding, and a screen popped up in front of me.
[Side Quest Received from _Rue_]
[Quest - Tutorial Guide]
[It’s getting late. Take the little girl home to her parents in the second last house along this street. Since this is a trading village, the family should have some connections with the merchants in the Inner City. Perhaps they’ll guide you to the tutorial quest as a favour for taking their daughter home.]
[Task: Take {Little Girl} Emmie home.]
[Reward:
200 EXP
13 G
Accept Quest?
Yes No]
Oh right. I stared down at my feet. The munchkin was still there lying on the floor, her thumb stuck in her mouth, a content expression on her face.
“Right. I guess this kills two birds with one stone,” I tapped [Yes] and leveraged Emmie into my arms so that her nodding head was resting on my shoulder. Much easier to do as an adult. After making sure she was comfortable, I turned back to Rue with the most scathing stare I could muster up. “But 13 gold? Really? That stingy?”
“It’s not that hard,” Rue shifted uncomfortably. “I just thought it would make things easier.”
“Oh well, money’s money. The extra help is appreciated,” I set off down the street, the sun that had been high in the sky already sinking towards the tall mountains in the distance. I waved at Rue with my free hand. “See you later, son.”
He didn’t reply. When I turned back after taking a few steps, he was already gone.