The nostalgia of holding an actual paper envelope in this age of electronic messaging and face-to-face video calls can fill one with a myriad of emotions. Most of the time it's dread or annoyance, the utility companies sending their reminders that, once again, you are Past Due. The weightless joy of the letter you've been waiting for from your top college pick containing your acceptance has finally come in? Or is it the crushing heaviness of your rejection?
The single piece of mail in my hand hardly has any weight to it at all. There's my name and address in the center, as any correctly sent envelope should have, but the corner for returns contains a single curious symbol. A logo. A simple, circular logo that stems from an elegant, flowing script E nestled in the center.
Ele-Quince Games was an up and coming company that was on the verge of releasing a brand new Full Immersion Virtual Reality, or FIVR, Role Playing Game. Before they announced their official release date, I found myself at the start of a chain of events that had major concequences. My eyebrows knit together as I recall everything from personal memory and articles I've read since.
Because of the way RPGs were written for FIVR games at the time, Non Playable Characters, or NPCs, couldn't be coded to be indestructable like the ones written on past consoles. So, if one were to die by any means, then their part in the game is over. Most players took that sort of knowledge with a grain of salt. I know I did.
In my rush to reach the level cap, the highest level one could obtain in the game at the time, I accidentally got a few prominent NPCs killed before their time. The game was called Pangaea and it was the big game of the season.
There I was, exploring and grinding, killing monsters at a constant pace for Experience Points to gain levels, in a little used part of a vast forest. I almost always preferred being solo, unless a Quest demanded I join a party. I usually found people who took their roles too seriously cheesey and the ones who didn't get into it at all a sort of waste of fantasy space. It's like driving on the freeway: everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.
Besides the role playing aspect, I was also a Min-Maxing Meta Gamer. That's someone who studies every aspect of a game in order to exploit understood formulas such as: best places to level, best race and class combination, and best skills to use for maximum possible damage. Sure, I would get into it, as long as I was some overpowered ramapaging dealer of death.
In Pangaea I chose to be a Spellsword, a hybrid sword and armor wielding fighter/mage. I mostly learned Support type magic that further increased my own abilities allowing me to hit harder, faster, and with greater accuracy.
During that time I discovered a large cave and before I could make heads or tails of it an Adult Red Dragon was making its way out of the entrance. I had just arrived, but I wasn't sure if I was the one that drew it out. Not knowing what else to do, I let out a less than masculine scream of terror and ran off in the opposite direction. Had I stayed low and kept quiet maybe things would have ended up differently.
I let loose a string of four letter words and agility boosting spells, praying to the gaming gods that I could escape. The Dragon had to have been at least level 200 and a small corner of my brain no longer wondered why no one else explored this area. I did have a lot of other questions though. Why only now did this scaly behemoth decide to leave its cave? Why hasn't anyone tried to go on a raid on it since they all knew it was here? Also, what happened to the sun? Why is it dark so early?
Oh…
The Red Dragon overtook me by flying overhead and I watched its silhouette circle back around for me. I instinctively cut right, harder and faster than any professional football player. They probably could too, if they had my stats or my motivation at the time. A 200+ lb corner just couldn't compare to a multi-ton magical beast of pure avarice and malevolence. I was being persued by an angry volcano, and as volcanoes do, it proceeded to pour fire out of its mouth.
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It ruined a perfectly good portion of the forest, but I was lucky enough to evade the greater portion of the flames, and subsequent damage, though I did manage to catch a few embers on my person.
[You received 276 fire damage!]
[You are critically wounded!]
I would've thanked the system for informing me, but I was too busy cursing the pain sensors for being left so high up at around 60%. The armor I was wearing doing little to absorb any of the magical damage. Well, I was fortunate enough not to catch on fire, dealing constant damage until my demise. Death Sickness in Pangaea meant losing a portion of your XP and dropping some of your current inventory. And since I was in a hurry to reach the level cap, I couldn't afford to lose anything but the dragon blowing kisses at my backside. So, I ran and I ran and I ran.
Fortunately, and rather unfortunately in hindsight, I reached a military outpost. My immediate plan was to lead the monstrosity to the NPC soldiers and to let them deal with it. That meant I practically left a fiery turd on their doorstep. Definitely not the nicest thing in the world to do, but they were NPCs and I didn't really have a better idea.
Looking over my shoulder I watched the structure burst into flames as arrows and bolts of magic flew up to their attacker in vain. I later learned that the king, his closest advisors, and all of his generals were having a very important meeting in that particular outpost in secret, due to its high seclusion. They were preparing for a war that was meant to kickstart the next big in game event. After their deaths, no one knew what to do, in game or out.
Coincidently, the lead writer had quit due to personal reasons, mostly blaming stress and lack of enjoyment in his work. The developers were thrown for such a loop that they just couldn't recover. They had no contingency plan. They had no time. Then, they had no players. People started dropping out in droves when they heard about the lead writer quitting and that the event was being put on hold until further notice.
After that, I felt like the most hated person in the gaming community. I kept getting weird threats from anonymous senders and stopped getting invites to tournaments and competitions, the main source of my income. I did what I could selling in game items and such, but it's a practice that's looked down upon by the developers so it was a convenient reason to get me kicked out of most games, ending my era of competitive gaming.
To make ends meet, I took a job in my mom's restaurant as a barback, basically the laborer of the bar who sets up all the fruit, stocks the alcohol, grabs buckets of ice, and a myriad of other things. I played second fiddle to the bartender and received a small portion of the tips for the night. The one good thing about being the bar grunt is it really taught me how to be resourceful. Often, I found myself making do with much less than I needed, a trait that I found translated well in real life.
Then everything came to a high pitched, mangled metal, burnt rubber scented halt. I was still depressed about the incident a whole year later, when my parents got into a horrific car accident. My dad died on the spot, my mom survived. After she was discharged from the hospital I'm honestly not sure what happened to her. Her health was slowly, but steadily declining and she ended up quitting from the restaurant. It took another year and a half before she was bad enough to need to stay in the hospital for an extended period of time.
One of the first things to go before she ended up in the hospital was her vocal chords. In an effort to keep both of our spirits up, she decided for us to learn American Sign Language. We both became fairly proficient when the time came for her to live in her hospital bed.
What seemed like an entirely seperate lifetime, flashed through my mind in an instant the moment I saw that logo. Everything seemed to lead up to this moment. I carefully extracted the letter from within and was left with a puzzle to solve.
"Dear Mr. Winters,
We hope this letter finds you well and in high spirits! If not, we hope the news it bears will instill some excitement into you! We invite you to participate in the beta run of a new FIVR RPG, Arc the Game. Enclosed is the date, time, and location of the meeting that will, hopefully, explain in greater detail the unique nature of this endeavor…
Blah blah blah…
5 million dollars…?
Possible live streaming…?
Signed,
Gerard Quince
Lead Writer and Developer of Ele-Quince Games"
My first invite in years and there's talk of monetary prizes and a TV show? I guess I'll get more information at this meeting in five days. Better let Mom know.