BOOM!
With a great explosive force, the ceiling and walls of nearly the entire castle collapsed, which only revealed further to the inhabitants that weren't particularly flattened the sheer madness going on outside. Water elementals crawling out of the well at a rate the capitol guards could barely hold back. Giant mechanical things with bodies and legs like spiders and covered in gears that emitted steam crawling around wrecking the roads herded by a man piloting the largest one. An immensely strong warrior that found the store of cannonballs. He Tossed them in the air before swinging his club into them, propelling the cannonballs at random guards or passerby, as though it were some kind of game to him.
In all of this utter madness, who could blame the royal guards for not paying enough attention to notice the relatively innocuous sight of a griffon ridden by two men, one of them locking a chain around his waist the other was holding. Of course it didn't help that one of the castle guards revealed himself a traitor, casting some spell or throwing some item creating a cloud of smoke, obscuring everything. Only those paying enough attention from outside the smoke would notice the chained man, swinging into the smoke empty handed, and leaving with none other than the princess of the Taren Empire!
Wait, I should probably start from the beginning, shouldn't I? Alright, let me start over.
In the year 30xx, a few months after the beginning colonisation of Jupiter, a new game came out that caught the eye of many people. It was a game the Dev's and Creator, who all remained anonymous for reasons the world would find out soon enough, seemed to pour their absolute heart, soul, and mind into. It was free to play, completely and utterly, no ads, no subscription, nothing, just a small button on the login screen for anonymous donations. Now this game was special due to the amazing fact that it had more detail put into it than many of the pay to play games out there. Character customization was massive, including creation, and getting into the game world, it felt more like a world simulator that the government would run on hyper-advanced alien supercomputers than a game even. It was overwhelming for many players. Even the controls were completely customizable, some chose to play and control like an fps, some a traditional mmo, some a Lane Based Brawler, some dove right into vr, and all forms inbetween. There were even streams of people who played it with ancient hardware, using only three buttons, or one man even used a dance pad. One thing was clear, the only restrictions were the ones the players hadn't figured out how to break.
But after a few weeks of the game being out, the developer announced that current server was just a test server, and that everybody would have to move their characters to the actual server in an event happening in three weeks for characters of all stages. It was an event where the world was ending, and the players all had to make it to portals in the towns before their characters were destroyed. Everyone agreed it was a fun event, and an interesting way to move things onto the actual proper server, as well as do a wipe of the characters of players that dropped the game behind the scenes.
And here is where it started getting odd, when the players went to interact with the npc's, they acted very, unsettlingly, real. The Devs had explained that the real game was intended to be a roleplaying game to the utmost extent, with ai to match, so it would explain why the adventurer's guild lady was so confused when the players started talking about DPS( Damage Per Second), Aggro (A Shorthand for the likelihood of an enemy attacking you), and CC (Crowd Control) right in front of her after recieving a request.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
But still, eventually people started to roleplay more, even if only so the NPC's would stop asking them about dps and such. Most people also agreed that due to just how real they were, it would be in bad taste to be mean to them. Most people, not all of them. Eventually throughout the game's first few official weeks, 6 players came together, and they hit it off. Why wouldn't they, they had a surprising amount in common, all single, all guys, all average working people, and the game was practically their lives. They joked about how it was kind of sad, then laughed at themselves while slaying trolls effortlessly, then elementals, then dragons, then opening planar rifts. All throughout laughing, joking, celebrating a birthday, and discovering everything about the game like overeager 4 year olds. They even got a special pm from the devs, congratulating them on being the first people to create a private plane. Not the flying kind of plane.
And eventually, they hit a ceiling. Not an immovable one, but progress in abusing and learning more about the system would move much slower, so, they got more involved in events, and found one thing. They were kind of same-y. After doing enough of them, they sensed a pattern, either 'Bad Guy X is causing problem Y so stop him' sometimes adding 'So find Item C and use it in some way on something', or 'We have had a Drought/Flood/Problem Q so please do task Z or Collect Resource U'. All oddly realistic stuff at times too.
So, they decided to found a solution. When I say found, I don't mean find, I mean Found. They founded the Group 'Chaotic|Nonsense' and from there, they decided that they would Become the interesting events. And so they caused havoc periodically, creating unstable mana vortexes on this farm here, slapping awake an ancient dragon and running towards the nearest city there. Either way, chaos, panic, some NPC death, and interesting stuff. It was odd how the NPC's never respawned. They also followed the same Injury Rules as the players, broken bones, ones that were missing a leg remained missing that leg, they seemed to follow the rest of the players rules as well. They also seemed quite, emotional. The normal Adventurer's guild lady was replaced for a few weeks after one of Chaotic|Nonsense's 'events'. Apparently she was caring for her little sister after her leg was broken. Sure enough after some investigation by stealthy players that heard this, there she was, soup in hand by her sister's bedside, an expression of pure worry on her face. It was eerie, to say the least, how real it felt at times.
It was after these events made the news one day due to a lack of other news that the government decided to investigate, and after tests in game with NPC's they determined something that had been a suspicion in many minds for a while, the NPC's were completely and utterly sentient. The only thing seperating them from being just like us were some racial differences with the elves and dwarves and such, and a screen.
So of course the problem, they release the statement, but now what to do about Chaotic|Nonsense? They have killed potentially hundreds of innocents by now, even if only in the game. So, seeing as it was a confusing legal case, the game devs and creator were untrackable, so even though many wanted to hold them accountable, they couldn't. So, the single most confused and unsure ruling of the century was made, all the members of Chaotic|Nonsense would be tracked down, brought to one location, and their Conciousness' would be permanently transferred into their characters, normally it's highly illegal to transfer your consciousness out of your body, but an exception was made, and their bodies cremated. They would be Imprisoned in the game, probably for eternity, considering their characters had access to immortality, and the creator and devs probably also downloaded themselves into immortal forms somewhere, probably near the server so as to maintain it.
So now here is where it all starts, a Brotherly Band of 6 friends and fiends, forcibly trapped in their favorite game. At least for all this trouble, the Devs and Creator themselves went out of their way to include Chaotic|Nonsense into the official update, giving them an official group, a big shoutout with a thanks for keeping things interesting for them, and some medals in their inventories. But enough about all this boring stuff, let's get back into the story!