School, of course, was all abuzz with students and even staff and teachers talking about DVI. After all, pretty much everyone had been in the game last night and would continue to log on nightly. We didn’t exactly have the option not to.
Nevertheless, the bulk of the discussions, snippets that I heard here and there, were layered with excitement, talking about elves and fireballs, giant rats and spears, martial arts and NPCs.
In homeroom, which I unfortunately didn’t share with any of my close friends, the two girls in front of my corner seat were talking about the game.
“I’m a Cryomancer,” Anna was saying, “I was able to freeze those nasty rats in place and then shoot them with magic icicles. How cool is that!?”
“Eh, the cold never bothered you anyway,” Monica replied.
“So funny I forgot to laugh. That movie is ancient. Anywho, what class did you get, Mona?”
“Oh? I got Cheerleader, of course.” Monica Ruuki was pretty much everything you might expect a small-town cheerleader to be: leggy, blonde, and in probably better shape than any of the athletes she cheered for on the field or court. She was, however, not as stuck up as the stereotypes might have led one to expect, friendly to all, and as willing to give an encouraging word to a student studying in the library as she was to any athlete. She was also wearing her cheerleading uniform to class today as there would be a pep assembly fifth hour.
“Cheerleader?” Anna asked, “Is that even a class?”
“I took the Path of Action,” Monica replied. “The problem is with my race.”
“Oh?”
“Orc. I look like a green-skinned, butch, biker chick with sharp teeth.”
“Ouch, I’m sorry,” Anna winced.
“Oh, it’s not that bad, except all the cute boys are shorter than me now.” Monica laughed. “Not that I’m looking.” Then she turned around in her chair, “So, how ‘bout you, James? Did you get anything interesting?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I nodded. “I got mostly what I wanted, anyway. I’m a healer, keeping Mika and the others in good health.”
“Ohhh!” Anna turned in her chair, too. “That sounds useful. Right now, I’m killing everything quickly enough that they can’t get to me, but if I can’t freeze them in place, they might hurt me. I know you’re taken,” her emphasis made it sound like I was in a relationship, “but I wonder if there are other people with healer skills running around.”
“Oh, probably,” I answered. “Healers usually aren’t super-common in games, not the way other casters are, but there’s usually always enough around for most groups. I don’t know how it will work with DVI, though. Maybe more because of randomness or maybe less because there’s a whole bunch of people who don’t usually play games.”
Anna and Monica both nodded.
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“Now I’m curious. What sort of skills does a Cheerleader class have?” I asked Monica.
“I’m a hybrid class,” she replied, and I remembered that amongst all her extra-curricular activities, Monica had been into tabletop gaming in junior high. “Kind of part bard and part, well, monk, I guess. I don’t use weapons; I kick things. But I also have cheer routines and inspirations to provide buffs. I bet I get access to a little healing later on.”
I was impressed. “That sounds like a really good class.”
“It does,” Anna agreed.
“Well, if you want,” Monica said, “once I get stronger, I can help you cross-class to it. I’ve got a quest to do that, actually. To help train people in my class, but I have to be level ten before I can start it.”
“Ah, I don’t know,” Anna demurred. “I attack things at range, so kicking them is not a good addition to my build. But I bet James would make a great cheerleader.”
I was saved from answering by the bell ringing and class starting. Both girls turned around and gave their attention to the teacher and the announcements starting the day.
Given that I was a fairy in DVI, kicking monsters would probably not be a good combat style to add, and the buffs Monica mentioned were probably similar to what Naomi’s Tactician provided, just with a different name. That could go either way. Either they’d overlap and stack, which would be good. Or they’d overlap and overwrite, which would be less good.
I did have to admit some curiosity about that quest she had though. It sounded almost like a variation on one of my geases, where I had to create a church for Sirae. Just constructing a building wouldn’t be enough, she would need followers, and that “recruiting others to the same
In general, homeroom was a waste of time other than the announcements. It was a glorified study hall, and since all my homework was already done, and most of my classes didn’t actually assign homework anyway, there wasn’t much for me to do in the half-hour before real classes began. So my mind wandered, and I doodled in my notebook.
It was nothing spectacular -- I didn’t have an artistic talent -- but in between spirals, assorted geometric shapes, and miniature tornados, I also sketched Mikachu’s totem toppling over and squishing a couple rats. And I sketched something that I was vaguely able to identify as a tall, muscular, nun in a cheerleader-inspired outfit standing by the pulpit of a church.
Perhaps I was subconsciously considering helping Monica with her quest in exchange for her helping with mine.
* * *
This semester, I didn’t have hardly any classes with my particular group of friends, though I saw them in the halls quite often. Usually that was because I was going to the classroom they were leaving, but Mika and I had adjacent lockers. I had English class with Susie twice a week, History with Naomi the other three days, and Mika and I had the same PE class every day right before lunch. So I didn’t really get to talk with them much at the start of the day.
But that didn’t mean I was quiet. I was friendly with many of my other classmates, like Anna and Monica, even if we didn’t exactly hang out. Then again, while there were several small circles of friends, like mine, our school was really too small to have much in the way of cliques. Or, rather, there was a lot of overlap. The basketball captain was also the debate club captain, for instance.
Sure, there were still jocks and nerds and gamers and preppies, but I liked to think of it more as a faction-based environment than a clique or caste-based system. With a high school of only about two hundred students (approximately fifty per grade), everybody pretty much knew everybody else -- certainly in their grade level.
So I got to hear about several of my other classmates’ characters. There was Xander who gambled on the Path of Fate and got an odd combination of Frost Elemental and Farmer. He kept the non-combat class because the race was so interesting. Maria and Macy were commiserating over the difficulties of using fire magic to fight -- setting a monster on fire was fine and dandy until you were attacked by a flaming monster that most definitely wasn’t dead yet. Bob was asking for advice on how to make a Fortune Teller class work.
That sort of stuff.