If my sleep was troubled by dreams, there was nothing left to bother me but a faint sense of unease or anticipation when I awoke. It was still dark, and thus far too early to be awake—the only light were from constellations of colored status LEDs on powerstrips or other electronics. The streetlight on the corner, whose rays could feebly reach through my bedroom window and which was my companion in many long hours of surreptitiously reading past bedtime when I was younger, only let in a little light around the edges of the curtains.
For a long moment, I lay there, wondering just why it was that I had awoken so early and contemplating an unusual configuration of status lights slowly twinkling like the Pleiades off along the side wall where no electronics really should have been.
Finally, my mind caught up with my body, and I realized that it was, of course, the FIVR pod. I had stayed up too late, playing from before midnight until after noon, then collapsed into bed and had, apparently, slept until after dark. I fumbled around for my phone, wincing as its sudden brightness stabbed into my eyes, and squinted against the brilliance until my eyes could focus on the time it displayed.
“4:45 AM!” Between the game and sleeping, I had lost an entire day! Granted, I didn’t have anything else I had really needed to do—my twin was capable enough to make her own dinner—but, still….
Now that I was awake, though, my body was rather pointedly letting me know that it had certain needs that had gone unmet while I was lying in the FIVR pod or in bed for the past almost-thirty hours.
A disadvantage of living in houses rather than apartments is that bathrooms are further away. Better than college dorms, at least the ones I had lived in, but still down the stairs, through the living room, through the corner of the dining room, and hope to high heaven that the bathroom was currently unoccupied.
Most pressing needs resolved, addressing the empty hole in my midsection was next. I wasn’t strictly ravenous, since I had done next to nothing all day, but a body accustomed to regular meals doesn’t like to go without, and I had apparently missed a full day’s worth of eating. So, breakfast was a bit larger than normal.
Growing up, breakfast had been cereal and milk, and not even living on my own at college or stumbling into a lucky lottery win had changed that habit. Pancakes, bacon, eggs, and even toast—all things that many others associated with breakfast—were still dinner foods. Dinner was the only meal that had been cooked, so perforce any food that needed cooking was thus a dinner food.
My twin came down as I was finishing up the last of my cereal, fruit-on-the-bottom blackberry yogurt, and granola bars. She looked remarkably bleary eyed for someone who was as much a morning person as I was not. I raised a brow as I greeted her, “Good morning, Lex.”
“Morning, yes,” she responded, using my typical response to her—the implication being that while it was morning, it wasn’t a good one.
“Hey, is something the matter?”
She brushed aside my concern, “No, not really. Just stayed up too late two nights in a row. I shouldn’t be getting up this early after so little sleep, but if I let myself sleep in, then I’ll end up sleeping the whole day away.”
Ouch. Shots fired.
“Well…. It sounds like you’ve been having fun in ECHO then?”
She nodded, and a couple minutes later I found myself jogging along with her down the couple short blocks (town blocks, a few homes and lawns long, not city blocks a few miles long) to the town’s sole traffic light. My speed was a pace she probably found too slow, but she didn’t complain, surge ahead, or chide me to go faster. I was even dressed for exercise, though more conservatively than she. Lex wore black jogging tights with blue racing stripes and a dark blue, fitted tank top over a sports bra that matched the tights. Me, I wore my old blue-and-gold running shorts from the year I had reluctantly been part of the track team and an overlarge, loose tee that nearly hid all of the too-short shorts. All my other shorts were knee-length denim or cargo shorts, and those are no fun to try and exercise in.
And as we jogged, we talked since the pace was slow enough that we weren’t needing to breathe heavily. I wasn’t in bad shape—I just wasn’t in my twin’s league. Then again, some Olympians probably weren’t in her league, so at least I was in good company.
“I started in a town called Water’s Edge,” she was saying, “which isn’t all that inspiring of a name.”
“Not that different from Seaside or Long Beach.” I named the next two small communities north.
She snorted, “You have a point. While I was there, I met up with a player who’s been in since beta, and we grouped up. I think you might have to play without me, Alexis.”
That was fortunate. Granted, we hadn’t really planned on playing together, but we also hadn’t planned on playing separately, either. However, it meant that I wouldn’t have to explain how and why I was playing a girl in VR.
“Well, I probably would not have been able to keep up with you and your exploring anyway, Lex. I guess it’s easier this way. We can both do our own things without worrying that we’re slowing the other down. But … beta? I wasn’t aware that the game had had a public beta.”
She shrugged, “She didn’t say more and I didn’t think to ask. But that’s beside the point. She offered me a spot on her ship—ah, a pirate ship. Think about it, deserted islands, hidden coves, buried treasures, there’s so much to explore and do.”
When we reached the light, she pointed to the right, and I inwardly groaned. This would then be the “short loop” with the hill at the end rather than the “long loop” that was mostly flat.
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We jogged past the cluster of small businesses that gathered around the intersection like chicks around a mother hen, and then on past undeveloped woodland toward the too-small public library and not-much-larger hospital.
“Wouldn’t there be, well, less to see and explore on a ship most of the time?” I asked. “After all, we’re talking about sailing ships, right. Certainly not a cruise liner.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “There is a bit of a trade-off. But since it’s a game, I don’t have to be there for all the sailing parts, though she is starting to teach me, so I will probably be there for a lot of it. Plus, you never know when something exciting might happen, like a sea battle with other pirates.”
Beyond the hospital, we went a little further to School Road and made another right. Had I been walking the route, I would have gone a few dozen more feet beyond, to the access road that led into the school’s parking lot and terminated outside the metal and auto shop, taking the sidewalk in front of the school and maybe even climbed the two flights of steps to the entrance to look in on part of my childhood. Instead, we followed the road that abutted the parking lot and then curved past the track and bleachers where my walking route would have rejoined the short loop.
Technically, I suppose, School Road became some-other-street-name Avenue when it curved from being east-west to north-south, but it would always be School Road in my mind, since at the top of the hill, past the bus garage, was the middle school. After that, the route was all downhill, three blocks or so, until a final right turn and one block to our front door.
Along the way, we talked a little more about the ship, sailing, and exploring before she turned the conversation to an unexpected topic.
“Did you hear?” she asked. “Apparently one of the players beat the monster at the end of the tutorial. I really want to meet her, but that probably won’t happen for a while unless she starts in the same town I started in.”
“Uh? Wha—? Huh?” I couldn’t admit to her that I was that girl. While she probably wouldn’t make a big deal of it—not like others might—I still had my manly pride to consider. Distracted, I didn’t notice when we jogged right past our house, not until she shot me an approving look, hopefully for doing a second lap without complaint. Hastily, I decided on a bit of misdirection. “I thought you were supposed to run away from that. That’s what my faerie assistant told me to do.”
“Yeah, mine too,” she replied. “When he wasn’t being a flirt, he was pretty useful. But, anyway, I wouldn’t have tried to fight it even without him telling me to run. I don’t know how anyone could fight a giant tornado throwing lightning bolts around. I think you need to be pretty high level to be able to dodge lightning bolts—I wasn’t going to try. But even if I could, how do you fight a tornado? Still, she must have figured something out.” Admiration shone through in her voice.
“Um, maybe it wasn’t a tornado? The boss monster that showed up for me was like a giant stone centaur, but it would have needed a lot of dodging too since it was throwing giant boulders that could have squashed anyone flat with one hit.”
“Huh. Maybe she got an easier one, but still easier doesn’t mean easy. She couldn’t have been more than level two or three, and that monster was more than level twenty and maybe more than level thirty.” My twin was definitely very focused on my exploits … even if she didn’t know they were my exploits. “That still has to have been very hard to have done, right?”
“It…. It sure sounds like it. But how do you know her level and its level? Speaking of which, how do you know it was a girl?” Before she could respond, I hastily clarified, “I’m not saying a girl couldn’t do it or that it was likely a guy, but if you haven’t met the player, how do you know any of this?”
“Don’t worry, Alexis. I know you weren’t going sexist on me. But, you must not have seen any ‘System Broadcast’ messages while you were on. I didn’t see hers, but I saw a couple from other people. Apparently, being the first to do something special gets rewarded with achievements and certain ones get told to everyone who’s in the game at the time.
“So someone posted about her on the forums, asking how it was possible, and people started jumping in left and right. The player’s name has been censored out, which doesn’t make sense because her name was in the messages everyone saw if they were logged on at that time, but with the amount of anger and vitriol in some of those posts, maybe it does make sense.”
Drat. I had forgotten about those messages. I’ll have to look to see if there’s a way to turn off future ones; if I hadn’t been so sleepy and distracted, I would have looked for that then. “So, people are angry? Why? I mean, sure, maybe she got first to do something, but there’s a lot of somethings out there to be first at, right?” More misdirection.
My twin shrugged as we turned back onto School Road. “Some are mad because they didn’t even try, thinking it was an unwinnable fight. Others are mad because they think she must have cheated to win. And even still others are mad because they aren’t in the game yet, so they don’t have a chance to get any of the firsts that she and others are getting. Apparently the game staff are looking into whether she cheated or not, but their initial impression is that the achievements are legitimate but unintended. Whatever that means.”
“Probably that they don’t think she cheated but aren’t sure how she managed it, either? I might look at the forums when we get back and see what else is going on. Speaking of which, I think this lap is enough for me. I was only going to walk a bit to stretch out, not run up and down the school hill all day.”
“Sure, go in then. I think I’ll do the beach loop once after this, which will give enough time for you to shower and for the hot water to refill.”
The beach loop really should have been called something else, since it didn’t quite get out to the beach. It went straight through the light and wound its way west and then south through the hilly land at the south of the peninsula, passing by the access road to one lighthouse, but stopping and coming back north along the river into town and returning to the traffic light from the south. Unless you counted the overlook, the closest the so-called beach loop actually came to the beach was about three quarters of a mile, where the main road continued to the beach, coast guard station, and the main lighthouse and jetties, but the loop route turned and came back to town.
All in all, it was about a five mile loop. I’ve certainly walked it in the past—even after moving back to town—but there were too many hills for me to want to jog it. Besides, there was a game to get back to!
We finished the rest of the jog in companionable silence, and as I turned up our sidewalk, Lex picked up the pace, going from a jog to an actual run.
A quick shower and a change of clothes later, I was lying back in the FIVR pod, ready to return to virtual reality.
Before I closed the pod, though, I spent a long moment just contemplating things. I was getting ready to log in and turn into a girl again, but the prospect didn’t really seem to bother me that much. It was still “just a game,” after all. And despite the game systems making the body of my hivatar and game character feel natural, that didn’t seem to affect me outside the game. I still felt just as natural and comfortable in my own body as I had before. It wasn’t like being a flying mermaid or young Tauros girl was now the default and my real body felt foreign, so it was much more a case of “What happens in FIVR stays in FIVR,” if I may misappropriate the catchphrase.