We spent the next few hours scavenging various stores. Surprisingly, once Jess really got into it, she really got into it. She managed to find loads of goods hidden in secret spots, even finding a huge ruby hidden behind a painting. Which promptly vanished after she selected it and dumped it in her character’s inventory.
Most of the good stuff was locked behind thick glass cases or enormous chests. Neither of us had any lockpicks or anything else to pry open these containers. Jess tried to chuck a huge greatsword into the glass on one, but she didn’t even scratch the thing.
That wasn’t to say we didn’t still find plenty of stuff. A good few stores still had some top notch gear available. I found myself a nice pair of daggers with gem-encrusted handles, something that, according to the item’s description, probably would’ve taken me days to grind for otherwise.
Likewise, Jess found a full set of steel plate armor that was recommended for players that were about twelve levels ahead of where she was now. Accompanying that was a sword and shield that was meant for players fifteen levels ahead of her.
Unfortunately, I found that I couldn’t wear any armor besides the shiny purple carapace-like suit that I spawned with. I was finding myself more and more annoyed with the fact that I had become a rogue.
Not that I had an option considering I’d spawned as one right as soon as I woke up in that tiny cabin. Jess had, likewise, become a knight, though not through her own choice.
“Hey, chin up,” Jess said cheerily, noticing my sulking. “You still got room for plenty of other goods, right? Don’t be so sad just because you can’t change your set.”
She patted my head with her enormous right hand.
I shoved her arm aside and put it back to her hips. “You’ve sure calmed down.”
“Well, I’ve had someone to calm me down,” she noted happily.
I blushed a little bit at her compliment. “How’re you holding up? With your body?”
“Well, it could be worse.” Jess frowned a little. “It certainly seemed like a terrible thing to have happened to me. At first. It’s kinda a novel experience, actually. Being a big and buff hot guy is actually kinda cool.
She turned to face me. “Well? You think I’m hot? Do I make your heart skip a beat?”
Jess started posing and flexing, her face puckered up as if to look aloof.
“Not into guys,” I told her, chuckling at the ridiculous display. “ But if I was, I’d be all over you.”
“What about me?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips and giving her an aloof pose of my own. “Am I hot enough for you?”
“You look like an idiot.”
“H-hey!”
She snickered, and I couldn’t help but crack a smile of my own.
A loud ping rang through my head. From the look on Jess’ face, it looked like she’d heard it too.
“A notification?” I asked.
“Dunno. Let’s check.” She pulled up her menu and began to look at her messages. I did the same.
The message was long-winded and stark. It was hard to believe what we were looking at.
Apparently, someone had managed to open up vulnerabilities within Delsana’s code. And they had also managed to exploit a flaw in the first generation neural links, one which interferes with brain waves. Force logging wasn’t exactly fatal, technically. But if we did so, we’d wind up brain dead.
An issue in the original neural links made it possible to deny the console the ability to unsync itself from our minds. Something about the frontal cortex being at the mercy of the system. It was a simple oversight for the Alpha that hadn’t been fixed because the beta testers for Delsana—all of them— hadn’t adopted the original links. Newer links were fine: only the older ones suffered from the flaw. It wasn’t obvious that it would be an issue. Until now.
The game was completely isolated— no connections outside of the game world were even possible, barring the two messages that had been sent to the remaining players. At any rate, the hacker had made it possible for anyone with the proper knowledge of the game’s code to send out a signal which would totally shut off the ability to unsync. Worse still, opening the game up to administrators to handle the issue and prevent more deaths would mean opening it up to the unidentified hacker. And the hacker could very well be intent on killing everyone as soon as the intranet was opened up.
In short, we were screwed. Getting an actual fix meant potentially allowing our deaths. Meanwhile, we were totally cut off from any outside communication. Even sending us these two messages was hotly debated, since it temporarily meant that the attacker could regain access. We were getting some aid though.
For as long as we were in the game, a special team of volunteers from Altera itself would be entering the game to gain some semblance of order. It consisted of everything from game developers to actual company security personnel. They couldn’t leave once they entered and volunteered solely to help those stuck within the game.
Additionally, our bodies in the real world would be taken care of by hospital staff bankrolled by Altera themselves. Automatic force logging due to hunger or dehydration was deactivated.
We were also told to go to a city, Ralcor, at the center of the world map. It was the closest meeting spot that took into account the unique areas where people had spawned.
Lastly, though not something they had power over, the message claimed that every NPC in town that had suddenly gone missing would reappear in the morning. The hack had forced all NPC and environmental activities to halt. But the halt would only go on for another few hours. In the meantime, players were encouraged to gather as many supplies from nearby towns as possible for the trek to Ralcor. Further aid was unfortunately not viable, due to the looming threat of the hacker.
The message ended with a promise to find a solution to the problem and bring the hacker to justice as soon as possible. But it did note that as of yet, there were absolutely no clues on who it could possibly be. It also left off with a note that this would be the last piece of outside communication for a long time, to prevent the hacker from accessing the servers again.
…
I’d finished reading the message a few minutes ago, but I just kept looking over it again and again.
“Lot to take in,” Jess said meekly, face completely blank.
I shook my head and groaned. “This is unbelievable. Everyone with an Altera 1.0… That’s gotta be maybe five percent of the player base.”
“I’m guessing you have an Altera 1.0 too?” I asked Jess.
“Ditto.”
I strolled up to the back of the jewelry store we’d been looting and kicked a chest in frustration. Pain shot up my left leg. Altera games typically protected you from feeling more grave injuries, like a gunshot wound or a huge fall. But for something as mundane as kicking something hard, I felt the quick aching of it.
“This makes no sense,” I murmured. “Why the hell would anyone do this? This isn’t a freaking anime or a movie.”
“Maybe it’s just some loon who wanted to screw with people?” Jess offered.
A few possibilities ran through my mind. “You think it’s terrorists? Some underground militia just decides to hack into Altera servers and take all of us hostage?”
“I think, Jess began, eyes getting a wistful and faraway look, “that it’s not worth mulling over. We’re not gonna find out who did this just by wondering about it. What’s more important is what they left out. Why the heck are our bodies so different? They didn’t address that at all.”
I scratched my head. “Maybe they don’t know? After all, it’s not like we could’ve told them. They can’t even observe us, if what they said is true.”
“But this has to be the work of the hacker, right?”
“Must be. I wasn’t sure before, but I find it hard to believe the developers would just dump us into different bodies without telling us.”
Jess buried her hands in her face and squatted down on the floor. “Oh God, what am I supposed to do now? I have college, friends, family. Am I supposed to just sit and wait here in this game because some blowhard thought it’d be a good idea to screw with innocent people?”
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I reached out and patted her on the shoulder, unsure of what to do. “Hey, look, it’ll be alright.”
That was pretty pathetic. God, couldn’t I have come up with anything more original than that?
Jess turned to me with an angry look on her face. “How can you just say it’ll be alright? Don’t you have anyone you need to go back to?”
I didn’t, but I also didn’t think it was a great idea to tell her right now. “Look, this is Altera we’re talking about. Biggest gaming company in the world? One of the biggest names in tech? Whoever caused this is gonna be caught in a matter of days, if not hours. I’m sure heading over to Ralcor is nothing more than a distraction to give us something to do. “
“You think so?” she asked, frustration leaving her face.
“I know so,” I stated, matter-of-factly. “If there’s one thing big companies like Altera care about, it's managing their reputation. Plus, God knows that there’s gonna be some kinda huge class-action lawsuit against Altera for letting this happen. We’ll be rich once we get out of here.”
That seemed to brighten her up a bit, and she even took on a slight smile. “Well, that is one way to pay off my student loans.”
I reached out my hand to help her up. “Glad to see you’re over it.”
She took my hand and stood up. “I wouldn’t say, ‘over it,’ but whatever. So what do we do now, then?”
I turned to look at the semi-looted store around us. “Let’s keep doing what we were doing before. The message said to start gathering supplies while all the NPCs were gone.”
“Is that really necessary?” Jess asked. “Can’t we just head out to Ralcor right away? Maybe fast travel there?”
“Wait,” I said. “Do you not know about how progression works in the game?”
“I’ll be honest: Delsana never interested me much. I only bought it to tide me over until Dragunova released.”
“The Sci-Fi game?”
“That’s the one. I haven’t kept myself updated on Delsana.”
“Well,” I said, “Ralcor is an early-middle area in terms of character progression. You aren’t even supposed to step foot there until you’re about level 20. Not to mention you can’t even fast travel to places you haven’t been to. If we want to get there quickly, we’ll need to cheese this as much as possible and grab up plenty of goods while the NPCs aren’t here.”
“What happens if we don’t?”
“What happens in most video games when you head to somewhere way too high level for you?”
“We die?”
I nodded. “We die. If we manage to snag up some high enough level gear and loot, we can power level ourselves so that we don’t explode as soon as we set foot near Ralcor.”
Jess’ eyes grew wide. “Explode?”
“Figure of speech,” I muttered. “Well, kinda.”
Her eyes grew even wider. “Kinda?”
“There’s a mob that spawns near Ralcor that explodes if you get near it. Won’t insta-kill you if you’ve got enough protection and health, but it’s just another reason we gotta grind a bit first before we can head out.”
“How’re we gonna grind anyway?” Jess inquired. “All the NPCs that could give us quests are gone. Are any mobs even around?”
“We can grind later,” I replied. “Not that we should even be doing that if we could. Trust me, the amount of cash we’ll be making from looting these shops is going to far outscale what we’d make from just old fashioned monster killing or quests.”
“If you say so.”
The two of us continued our pillaging spree, going to any shop that held high value items. At one point, we hit what was basically the jackpot. Someone had left the back door open, and behind it was an enormous map that showed us in what direction we had to take to get to Ralcor.
It only showed a general outline of the world, but it updated our own personal maps to the extent that we had a pretty clear outline of where to go. The finer details left a bit to be desired, though.
“Hey, check it out,” Jess said, tossing me something shiny. A ring?
I reached out for it, nearly missing as I tried to grab the object with my annoyingly smaller hands. I thought I’d gotten used to my new body’s center of gravity, but apparently not. The tiny piece of metal fell down to the floor after bouncing square off of my face.
Trying to grab the ring again, I leaned down and accidentally slammed my head against the side of a table. My face smacked right down on the floor as the little trinket rolled a few inches to the left of me.
“Owowow… jeez, that hurt.”
I tried standing up and accidentally smacked my head up on the bottom of the table. Cursing, I finally managed to pick up the coin and stand up.
“You, uh, you okay?” Jess asked, cringing.
“I’m fine,” I answered her. “I’m just not really used to this body yet. How do you get around with, er,” I gestured to my chest, “ these?”
She shrugged. “I could ask the same about you and the bratwurst I got stuck between my legs. Sorry about chucking the ring right in your face. I didn’t realize just how much power my new arms have.”
I waved her off. “It’s fine.”
“Anyways,” Jess went on, “check out the ring I tossed to you. I think you’ll like it.
I took out the ring and checked the description, which appeared in a floating box next to it.
Draken Ring (Rec. Level 20 or under, Rogues Only)
* Rogue only
* 15% bonus to armor
* 10% bonus to damage output
I stared at the item, wide eyed. “Jess, are you giving this to me?”
“No, I just wanted to brag that I found it,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “Of course I’m giving it to you. I do have one request though.”
“Sure thing,” I answered, looking at the ring happily. “What is it?”
“Will you stick with me ‘till we get to Ralcor? I dunno how I’ll feel about footing it alone without anyone to talk to. There aren’t that many people with Altera 1.0s, and this is a big game. Who knows how long it'll be before I find anyone else? Besides, I know jack all about the mechanics.”
I gave her a warm smile as I slipped the ring onto my finger. “Of course I’ll stick with you. Frankly, I figured that we were already going to stay together. Not like we’re headed to different places.”
“I figured as much,” Jess said gladly. “Let’s make it official though.”
Another pinging noise went through my skull.
Jess has invited you to join her party! Accept? Y/N
Without a second thought, I selected yes. Instantly her health and mana pool appeared in the lower left corner of my vision, right next to mine.
“There,” I grinned, turning to Jess. “That’s that.”
She returned my grin with a grin of her own, only for it to be replaced with a horrified look.
“C-c-Crystal,” she stuttered. “Your arm!”
I looked down and immediately felt super weird. The ring had turned a hellish black and red color. Thin black tendrils erupted from the once golden exterior, snaking up my arm. I tried to take the ring off only to find that I couldn’t, because the ring had disappeared completely under my skin.
The tendrils burrowed into my flesh. Though painless, it still looked weird as heck, and my arm quickly turned into that garish black and red color. Eventually, the tendrils began to grow wider, criss crossing each other until a small web formed.
The empty spots between the webs darkened, forming what looked like black scales. By the time the process was over, my hand to my elbow was covered in a thick coating of scales.
“Awesome!” I shouted, staring down at my arm.
Jess, by contrast, was in a panic. “How the hell are you not freaking out right now? Your arm looks like my aunt’s purse!”
I started quivering with excitement. “No, no, you don’t get it! This is awesome!”
“How in the world are you okay with this? You’re making me nervous here.”
“This is one of the game’s legendary quests,” I answered her. “Only one person gets the special reward for completing it the first time!”
Jess stared at me, utterly bewildered. “Say what now?”
“The game has special legendary quests that appear at random. Anyone who gets these quests can complete then to earn an exclusive reward. You already know how the game will generate unique quests for you, right? Since the same feature is in Dragunova?”
“Yeah,” she responded, confusion leaving her face. “The game generates quests depending on what other quests have already been done, right? What NPCs die, what dungeons have been completed, that kind of thing determines quests, right?
“Well, legendary quests are pre-made. Whereas the regular quests might only have a slight amount of developer influence, legendary quests are completely designed by the developers. If you get one, you’re treated to a special quest line and reward, that can only ever be obtained by whoever gets the quest.”
“This one,” I continued, holding up my now scaly right arm, “is one shown off by the devs before release. If I complete it, I’ll get a unique set of armor that scales up with my level.”
Jess whistled. “Sure sounds nice. And just so we’re clear, you’re not at all freaked out by your new arm?”
“Freaked out?” I shook my head. “As if!” A notification chime sounded in my head. “I think I just got the quest alert!”
Pulling up my menu, I saw the quest description and smirked, beside myself. “Here it is!”
Legendary Quest Added:
The Drakenkin ring has bound itself to you. Will you follow its siren call?
A small waypoint appeared on my map as soon as I finished reading the description, guiding me to the next step of the quest.
“You seem pretty eager,” Jess noted, seeing how I was nearly bouncing up and down from excitement. “Gonna head out right away?”
I was sorely tempted to. But the legendary quest was gonna stick around forever. We only really had this one opportunity to loot the town. “Nah, we’re sticking around,” I said at last.
“For what?”
“We still need to get as many goods from the shops as we can. We can do the quest once the NPCs come back. There’s only so much time until they do.”
“Hmm,” murmured Jess. “Well, whatever you say. You know way more about the game than I do, so I’ll defer to you.”
“Alright!” I exclaimed, cracking another smile. “Let’s see what else we can dig up!”
We kept going through as many shops as possible after that, ransacking and taking the most valuable items. At one point, we grabbed more than either of our inventories could fill, and we ended up dumping out some of the less valuable goods we’d taken to make more room. Our bags might’ve just consisted of little more than an inventory screen, but they weren’t bottomless.
Jess was digging through a chest full of jewels when she suddenly piped up with a question. “Hey, Crystal.”
“What up?” I replied, upturning a register to look for any bits of currency.
“Won’t the NPCs get a bit iffy when they find out we took their stuff?” she inquired, suddenly looking nervous. “I mean, we did just raid their shops for anything valuable they have. Aren’t the characters in Delsana supposed to be uber-intelligent? Surely they’ll notice that their stuff is gone.”
I looked at her, nonplussed. “Eh, it’ll be fine. We can’t sell our goods here, that's all. The NPCs will notice that their items are all gone and they’ll start guarding up the rest of it. They have no reason to suspect us. All we need to do is find another town on the way to Ralcor and pawn our goods there. Once we turn it into cold hard cash, we won’t have to worry about getting headhunted.”
“Besides,” I continued, “no matter how smart they are, they’re still just a bunch of preprogrammed AI. Worst they’ll do if they find out what we did is put us in a temp jail.”
“Temp jail?”
“We’ll lose half of our experience toward the next level,” I explained. “And half of any gold that isn’t in a city bank. We don’t actually spend any time imprisoned. That’d suck.”
“You know,” Jess said, looking up from the box she was looting. “It is kind of weird.”
“What’s weird?” I asked, tossing the now empty register aside.
“That the NPCs are supposed to act just like regular people. Regular people are complicated. Honestly, however good the AI is at acting like people, it’s always gonna be a bit in the uncanny valley, won’t it? I think I’d honestly prefer it if all of the NPCs really just act how they usually do.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You want NPCs to be stock and lifeless characters that repeat the same lines no matter how often you talk to them?”
She shrugged. “All I’m saying is that people are hard to mimic. This AI stuff is gonna be a pretty sorry excuse for what humans are actually like. I won’t be surprised if more than a few people are totally creeped out by it.”
“Well,” I responded. “Let’s just wait until the NPCs come back and then you can judge them, alright?”
“Yeah, yeah.” she said, picking up an expensive-looking emerald necklace.
“Dith ith pretty nice,” Jess noted, yawning and tripping up on her words.
I looked at the in-game clock. It’d been about ten hours since we had met each other back in the city plaza.
Officially, you weren’t supposed to fall asleep in VR, but no one ever really paid attention to that particular rule. A lot of people would just dump their virtual body into an inn-game inn and sleep there. Game beds were usually infinitely more comfortable than the lumps people had in the real world.
Still, sleeping in VR usually brought on weird dreams and sensations. But of course, it wasn’t like we had a choice.
With a yawn of my own, I stared wearily at the still-empty shops around us, before turning back to Jess. “Let’s call it a night.”
“Agreed,” she replied immediately, before cocking her head. “Uh, where’re we sleeping, then?”
“I saw an inn we could check out,” I answered.
She didn’t seem keen on the idea. “Won’t the innkeeper be mad we slept in his place without shelling out first?”
I rolled my eyes. “We can deal with that later. Unless you want to sleep on the plaza’s grass?”
“Fine,” she relented. “But you’re dealing with the angry inkeep, not me, alright?”
I rolled my eyes even harder at that. “He ain’t even real. I can handle any crap he tries to pull on me, no doubt about it.”
“Sure, sure,” she said, smiling.