Nikola and Luke exited the Rectangular Prism Inn together, Nikola with her bag still laying over her shoulder, and Luke with his backpack hanging from his back.
The entrance of the city was noticeably more clogged with foot traffic now than when they had arrived, many Adventurers clad in leather armour and various weapons filing into the Copper Citadel with soggy pants and shoes. The flood had likely spread further, but happily the ground beneath her leather boots was dry as a bone.
"Where do you wish to conduct our experiment?" Nikola had to speak louder than usual to be able to be heard above all the talking, the players at the gates speaking in unison in their own private bubbles.
Luke squinted, his vision focusing on the far-away bits of the Citadel. The closer they got to the castle in the middle, the further away from the Shopping District they would be, which was where most Adventurers would congregate.
"Let's get closer to the castle. It'd be cool to get your shit all figured out with a castle in the backdrop, and the closer we get the more open fields there are." Open fields meant fewer houses to destroy, which was the goal.
'Shit figured out'? Nikola didn't question his wording aloud, but it had her wondering if their intentions differed as they started towards the castle in the distance.
As they were walking, the raven-haired girl's eyes wandered. They were still passing a fair number of people as they navigated to the supposedly less crowded area of the city. There were fairies, elves, draconic-looking folks, people whose faces were as canine as they were humanoid, and just plain humans. In her quaint little village, she had only ever seen a few non-humans wander in, and it had been an event each time.
Each one was dressed in a set of tailored armour or a set of mage's robes; such clothing had been out of reach to her for her entire life, as a breadmaker's daughter. To get her hands on such a thing, she would have had to slice the throat of the one wearing it.
To be an Adventurer, a Player, was apparently a lucrative business. In the books her father had read to her, hunting monsters and dragons was always discouraged. The main character would become friends with them instead, and the book would end in the hero patting the dragon or monster on the head after they had become great comrades. Each one's potential for greatness would be snuffed out and replaced with complacency and peace. Nikola had spent enough time living a peaceful, protected life. Life with her father had been good, but he was gone - for now. It was time for her to rise up and get some of what these people were getting.
It was then, during her train of thought, that she spotted a red snake falling from the sky. Actually, no - it wasn't a red snake, but rather thousands of trails of dark crimson streaking down the sky like waterfalls.
Nikola grabbed Luke by his cape and he skidded to a stop. "Luke, do you see that?"
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Luke's jaw dropped to the ground, landing between his boots. The entire horizon was bleeding, columns of redness making their way from above the clouds to the earth and beyond.
"Yes, but what the fuck is it?"
Instinctively, he drew the symbol to summon his Blue Box in the air; it was his way of interacting with the game, and if anything would be able to tell him what was going on, it would. It popped up gracefully, but its entire top half looked like it had been dipped in blood and the colour was only dripping further downward, consuming all the blue in its path.
"Oh fuck, that's not good."
As if to punctuate his point, when he looked over to Nikola, she was no longer vertical. No, she was quite diagonal, and before he could stop her fall she was fully horizontal, her body smacking into the ground with the horrid sort of crunch that happened when the person falling had done nothing to break their fall.
"Nikola!" The navy-haired man had no fucking clue what was happening. He didn't want to break his eyes away from the truly apocalyptic-looking sky, but he chanced it to take a closer look at the fallen NPC. Her chest was rising and falling, but her eyes had the sort of far-off stare that suggested nobody was home all of a sudden.
Where the hell had she gone? She hadn't even said anything before passing out, which meant that her sudden lack of consciousness was a surprise to her too. But she hadn't looked sick on the way to the Copper Citadel. Had she passed out from her Hunger Bar getting too low? Was she glitching out again? Was the sky seeping with a colour that wasn't its usual blueness too much for her poor little NPC heart to take?
Aaaaand that was about all the attention and brain power he could use on somebody who wasn't himself at the moment. Her admittedly poor condition didn't seem to be worsening, and he had bigger fish to fry. Considering the sky was now fully coated in a field of scarlet, his fish were deep-fried.
When his eyes met with his Blue Box, it was fully engulfed in its new colour and was now in fact a Red Box. Its interface was usually a tidy, familiar desktop-style rectangle with cheery and simplistic buttons, but what stared back at him in that moment was a single harsh, angular button in the middle of it all.
It read PHASE 2 IS BEGINNING: YOUR CHOICES, AND NOTES.
Hesitantly, with his hand and wrist humming with a gentle quiver, he reached out and clicked the button.
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Nikola awoke in a deep, long blackness. She appeared there standing, though she thought she remembered her body falling before she'd blanked out and woken up here - wherever 'here' was. The amount of times she had been made to feel helpless lately were far too numerous, and as she looked around, she figured this was about to be another one of those times. Damn it. She was about ready to go back to being the one creating feelings of helplessness for others again.
She rustled around in the leather bag at her side, pulling her cleaver from its cloth wrappings. She was still in her slip and the dress that didn't go below her knees, but if she used her [Cleaver] effectively enough, it wouldn't matter what she was wearing.
Across the expanse of darkness, a figure appeared. "Hello, Nikola E. Brightdark. I'm here to strike a deal with you," unfortunately.