Decision made, it was time to start learning how to do things in the world. I mean, running, skipping, jumping, climbing, and any other basic movement should be just the same as I’m used to—or, at least, close enough that the differences didn’t matter. But using the game inventory, equipping and unequipping items, learning skills and using abilities, and viewing the status screen—all of that pretty much has no real-world equivalent. At least, the game mechanics of it all, anyway.
So, it was back to the first message after all, the one that I had brushed aside to look at the rest of the messages that had popped up.
System Message: Welcome to the world of Elemental Chrysanthemum Heroine Online, Madelyn Alexis. To begin your journey, open the wooden treasure chest. Inside, you will find a selection of equipment and a scroll. Read the scroll to learn how to access your inventory, status, and other UI interfaces.
Speaking of typical game interface mechanics, I didn’t see anything flickering in my vision to display health bars, a minimap, a quest tracker, or anything else. Now that the little boxes had been expanded and read, there was nothing I could see that made anything look remotely like a game. Well, other than the semi-fantastical locale and my greatly different body, of course.
Even if I didn’t consciously notice the difference in walking (both from a lower perspective and from different anatomy) since the game systems made being Madelyn Alexis as “normal” and “natural” as being a flying mermaid/faerie, there was something distinctly and noticeably different about the whole experience.
Not even proprioception, kinematics, or whatever other fancy term to cover the translation between a real world body and a virtual avatar could disguise the very different sensation of walking in a dress compared to walking in pants or shorts. Especially a dress that amounted to a barely closed robe, with the sash and clasp being all that prevented it from being a long vest. It brought back memories of that one time when … well, never mind. Or that time when … well, also never mind. Some memories are best left buried.
“Note to self: early goal—get non-newbie clothes, preferably pants and not a dress.”
If I had spoken before now after appearing in the tutorial, I hadn’t really noticed it, but my voice … was different. Of course I should have realized it would be; having my normal voice coming from this character’s body would have been jarring for all and potentially embarrassing besides, but I wasn’t used to hearing myself sound cute. My new voice was soft and high-pitched (of course) and suggested a musicality that I certainly didn’t have in the real world. It was a bit disconcerting and, more than anything else, really brought home that my game character, my virtual body for the foreseeable future, was a girl. If my manly pride had a hit point bar, it would have been showing suffering a significant strike.
Perhaps it was because I was again speaking English, or at least what sounded like English to me, that the game avatar’s voice struck me this way when the hivatar’s hadn’t. Or maybe I had been then too caught up flying and all the other drastic changes to have paid much heed to the tone and timbre of my voice.
With a deep breath to steady my nerves, I approached the sign and the treasure box. From where I had arrived, the back of the sign had been toward me, but now I could read it. The letter forms weren’t precisely English, some had marks over them like many foreign languages do, and some shapes were unfamiliar, as if letters had been added to the alphabet, but the message was clear enough: “It’s dangerous to go alone. Open the chest and take these.”
Face, meet palm. Of course I got the reference.
Muttering something unflattering about the developers, I opened the chest and got my first real taste of how game mechanics differed from real-world mechanics. Other than the message boxes, of course. The chest was a little over knee-high to my short body, and half again as wide, yet contained a host of items that it couldn’t logically hold.
There were three bows, a long bow taller than I, a short bow about the length of my arm, and a crossbow with a span about the same. With them were two quivers of arrows and a bandolier of crossbow bolts (which seemed more than slightly impractical). There was also a tall, gnarled wooden staff half again as tall as I was, a couple rusty swords of various lengths, two small shields (one rounded and one diamond-shaped), a pair of rusty daggers, a wooden club like a primitive baseball bat, and a couple other assorted things I couldn’t name but assumed were weapons of some fashion.
Additionally, the chest contained a small leather bag, a half dozen small bottles that were probably potions, and a largish primitive scroll tied with an extremely ornate, and thoroughly out-of-place, ribbon of pale seafoam green stitched with coral. Assuming that it was the scroll indicated by the system message, I took it first. It took a minute or two to undo the ribbon since I didn’t want to just rip it off, and when I unrolled the scroll, the ribbon remained but the scroll disintegrated into motes of light that danced and wavered in my vision.
Then, the motes began to coalesce into new shapes and momentarily blurred. One after another, new half-seen images floated in my vision the way the minimized message boxes had.
First, to the upper left, a small circular portrait of my current face appeared. As with everything else, the background was pale seafoam green and the slightly ornate border was pink. There were several small, recessed, silvery, star-shaped pips spread along the upper left arc of the border—perhaps places to display future buffs or status effects. To the right of the portrait, three bars expanded rightward. The top was red, the middle was blue, and the bottom a too-vivid yellow. Health, mana, and stamina, I assumed. Together, they only consumed about two-thirds of the vertical height of the portrait.
Next, in the upper-right corner of my vision, another ornately bordered circle appeared. This, though, was mostly filled with black but for a small green dot next to what appeared to be a golden exclamation point. In a little ribbon-like accent at the bottom of the circle’s ornamentation was the text “Tutorial Instance.” Thus, likely a mini-map and the black representing unexplored territory. After all, I hadn’t yet gone anywhere in the tutorial beyond a few steps on the platform I had appeared upon.
After that, several small icons appeared and floated down to the lower right of my vision. They arranged themselves in a horizontal line that covered a hand’s width of view, but quickly pulled themselves even further to the right, resolving into a small leftward-facing seafoam green triangle. Before they did, though, I was able to make a guess as to what some of the icons represented. A stylized stick figure like on bathroom doors probably represented the character screen interface, though sadly that stylization was obviously representative of a female given its hourglass shape. A question mark probably represented a help menu, an open door the ability to log out, a bag the inventory, and a stylized scroll the quest log. I didn’t have a good guess on several other icons, but there was probably one for settings in the mix.
Finally, in the bottom left of my vision, the motes of light turned into a very pale and mostly translucent seafoam green box, again with an ornate pink border. This time, part of the border seemed to suggest tabs, so it was likely part of the messaging system. The box, like the icons, collapsed down into a sidewise-pointing triangle, this one to the right.
What didn’t appear were hotbars for skills, spells, or macros. Doing things rather than clicking things was, after all, a bit part of the allure of a virtual world. The few bits of user interface that did appear were necessary for the game elements, but if the characters didn’t have an inventory system and didn’t have game mechanics behind them like hit points and skill systems, then even those few elements probably wouldn’t have been needed. But carting around everything in bags or on pack animals and only being able to do in the game what we could do in real life would have been … boring.
I focused my attention on the little green triangle in the lower right, and let it expand back up until I found the status icon. I mentally selected it, and the icon expanded into a large rectangle, still pale seafoam green bordered with pink, until it covered about half my field of view. It was semi-translucent, so I could still see through it, and I discovered that if I shifted my attention to something in my surroundings, such as that irreverent sign, the status window faded to barely a shadow of itself, doing not much more than tinting part of my vision with a hint of green.
Anyway, I looked back at the window and was surprised by some of its contents.
[Player Data]
Name: Madelyn Alexis
Race: Beastkin (Tauros)
Level: 1
Class: Traveller [Lv 1]
Sub-class: n/a
Active Title: Heroine (+1 to all base attributes)
Hidden Title: n/a
Profession: n/a
Renown: 0
Health: 55
Mana: 22
Stamina: 22
STR: 10 (+1)
END: 10 (+1)
AGI: 10 (+1)
BRL: 10 (+1)
WIL: 10 (+1)
RFX: 10 (+1)
DEF: 10 (+4)
LCK: 10 (+1)
CHR: 10 (+2)
Unassigned AP: 5
[Equipment]
Head: Traveller’s Basic Headband (Ornamented) [DUR: ∞] [CHR: +1]
Torso: Traveller’s Basic Robe [DUR: ∞] [DEF: +3]
Arms:
Waist: Traveller’s Basic Sash [DUR: ∞] [DEF: +0]
Legs: Traveller’s Basic Cloth Slippers [DUR: ∞] [DEF: +0]
Main Hand:
Off-Hand:
Left Ring:
Right Ring:
Bracelet:
Necklace:
Other 1:
Other 2:
[Skills - Primary]
1.
2.
3.
4.
[Skills - Secondary]
1.
2.
3.
4.
[Spells / Abilities / Traits]
* Hidden Nature [Racial Trait] [Lv 0] Channel the power of your spirit animal. Transform to a more primal form with a boost to your subrace’s and class’s preferred attributes. Drains all mana after expiration. Duration: 5 minutes.
* Tauros Toughness [Subracial Trait] Incoming damage reduced by 5%.
* Mistshard [Spell, Unique, Evolvable] [Lv 0] Launch a slow, tracking shard of frozen mist at a target. Upon impact, it explodes dealing minor water damage to a foe or healing minor damage on an ally.
* Increased Movement Speed [Class / Passive] [Rk 0] Movement speed is increased by 5%.
* Increased Regeneration Rate [Class / Passive] [Rk 0] Health regeneration is increased by 1 per 5 minutes. Mana regeneration is increased by 1 per minute.
[Perks]
* Destiny’s Designer (Unique): Reputation gain is increased by 10%. Reputation loss is decreased by 10%.
* Chrysanthemum Heroine (Limited): A locus of fate around which stories and events swirl.
* Unique Spell (Unique): Grants a random, unique, evolvable spell from Element Water. Spell evolutions can be chosen at spell levels 10, 25, 50, 75, and 100.
The first surprising thing was the active title. Granted, I knew I had earned one, but I hadn’t expected it to be automatically equipped. Nor had I expected titles to have effects attached to them. It made me think back to earning the “who Almost Slew a Bear at 10” title in another game. Like that, this was a title that I hadn’t set out to get but had just stumbled into. Regardless, I wasn’t sure I’d want anyone and everyone to identify me as a “Heroine,” especially since I was more than a little uncomfortable about the title myself, and the presence of a “Hidden Title” spot on the screen implied I could still get the effects of the title without showing it off to anyone who cared to look. Granted, I still didn’t know how to examine another player, but that strongly suggested the capability existed.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
So, “Heroine” became a hidden title, and I confirmed that the +1s it gave were still applied. A nice little starting boost, but of all the things granted by the quirk of fate that had me be the 50,000th created character, one that possibly became trivial rather quickly.
The other big surprise was the stats on the equipment. I’m not sure if I had expected starting equipment to have much of a bonus at all, besides modesty and ornamentation, but the dress somehow provided 3 Defense. Without something to compare it to, I couldn’t say if that was big or not, but since I could—if I wanted—add five points to my Defense attribute from the unassigned points, it seemed possibly rather small. Then again, just how much defense is a dress really worth? It certainly wouldn’t stop arrows, swords, fireballs, animal bites or even a determined insect. More surprising though was not that the other equipment offered no defense but that the headband with its little yellow flower provided a minor boost to Charisma. I knew that the outfit had a certain charm when I was selecting the pieces back in character creation, but I never would have expected that to have been taken literally.
Skills, of course, were unselected, and that’s something I’d have to see about changing shortly, but I wanted to look at one other thing first. In the list under “Spells / Abilities / Traits,” I finally found it: Mistshard—the name of the spell I had gained from choosing a unique spell as my Heroine bonus.
While a bit more than a handful of options had caught my eye out of the list of pages of choices, thinking about each of them let me narrow it down even further. To begin with, the perk that would have turned all my equipment fancy had definitely sounded neat, but there didn’t seem to be a guarantee that it would remain consistent. I’ve seen too many characters in other games with horrendously clashing gearsets chosen for their bonus that they offer with no regard to the equipments’ appearances that I didn’t want to be permanently stuck like that. Further, fancy gear always attracts attention and often jealousy. And no matter what a little green muppet says, it isn’t fear that’s the path to the dark side—it’s jealousy. ECHO doesn’t have open-world player versus player capability, but there are plenty of other ways that people can negatively affect another’s game experience without PK-ing them.
If I had known what languages would be useful to know, then choosing the bonus that granted free language knowledge would have probably been the best, but without prior knowledge of the game world, it all too easily could have become a wasted opportunity. If I remember correctly, there’s around seven thousand languages still spoken in the real world and several important languages that have faded away, like Latin, any of the other Biblical languages, or whatever version of English that Beowulf had been written in (Poor Luna had suffered through me struggling through that, too.). If ECHO’s world is anything like the real world (and “Old High Zulathan” suggested it was), then what are the chances I’d choose something that I’d end up needing?
From a different tack, both the Imperial Lineage and the Race Relations perks had sounded good at first, but after a few moments’ thought revealed themselves to be rife with the potential for trouble. I mean, “unbroken matrilineal line” implied considerations and possible obligations I’d rather not consider, and being biracial in a fantasy world could have a lot more implications where the races are actually different, often vastly so. I had had a friend in college who was subject to prejudice for being dark-skinned (as, unfortunately, is still the case for millions of people), but had also faced being considered “not black enough” because his father was white. If all that is for being multi-ethnic within a single race, I imagine that being literally multi-racial might offer more problems.
The ability to forget a skill to undo mistakes had seemed, at first glance, something very powerful. Especially when it’s not just mistakes that can be fixed but swapping skills to something more appropriate for the current situation. But … it had sounded like the new skill would start at the lowest skill level, so it wouldn’t be something useful for swapping on the fly, and genuine mistakes could be fixed through systems in place already in the game.
It had thus came down to a coin flip, so to speak. I had closed my eyes, spun in a circle, and counted to fifty. When I had opened my eyes, I was facing somewhat toward the treasure chest and sign, so I had chosen the spell. If I had been facing away from them, so they weren’t in my field of view, I would have chosen the ability that granted a chance of making damage be considered elemental. Sure, a reasoned debate and an in-depth analysis might have led me to have chosen one over the other, but I was starting to get tired and hadn’t even killed my first monster yet!
Anyway, the spell looked potentially very good: damage or healing as well as tracking, so aim wouldn’t be as critical as with the bow and arrows I was likely to select from the starting gear. Focusing on the spell description in the list brought up a more detailed view of it.
Mistshard: [Unique / Evolvable] [Lv 0: 0/50] [Cost: 5 mana] [Cast Time: 0 seconds] [Cooldown: 10 seconds] [Range: 30 meters] [Max Travel Distance: 50 meters] [Target: 1 enemy or ally other than self] [Projectile Speed: 2 meters / second] Deals 5-7 damage as water elemental magic damage OR heals 6-8 health as water elemental magic restoration. Evolution available at spell level 10.
Quick mental math determined that I could cast the spell four times with my current mana bar for a total of 20 to 28 damage. Since I had 55 health, that wasn’t a whole lot if enemies had comparable amounts. I didn’t bother to do the simple math to figure out the healing with my current mana bar since I couldn’t use it to heal myself. Maybe an evolution path would give it that ability, later.
The big drawback, besides not being able to target myself, was the projectile speed. If I cast it at someone at the maximum range, they could potentially avoid it. On the other hand, that’s the only way it would miss.
Then it was time to assign my unspent AP points. I knew I wanted to go with archery, at least for now, so I put two points into Agility. Mindful of the “pain tolerance” aspect of Willpower and also of the mana I had to cast my unique spell, I put a point into that attribute. The max mana pool was increased by two, to a total of twenty-four, one less than casting the spell five times, but natural regeneration (boosted by the abilities from the default Traveller class) should let me squeak in that one extra cast without spending an AP on it just yet. The last two points went one to Endurance, giving me an additional five health and two stamina, and one to Brilliance. Sadly, the point in Brilliance didn’t seem to be enough to boost the damage or healing of Mistshard, so maybe it scaled slower than the health, mana, and stamina pools.
Skills were harder, but since I could reset them in the tutorial for no cost, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on them—otherwise, at this rate, I’d still be in the tutorial instance a week from now! I took two primary skills and two secondary skills, leaving the rest “unselected” for the moment until I got a bit more of a feel for the game. I had ideas, but I wanted to wait to see how things panned out. After all, as I can very easily attest to, ideas don’t often come to fruition. Almost reflexively, I glanced down again at my body.
So now my skills were Archery (A/R) and Stealth (A/W) for my primary skills and Dagger (A/R) and Dodge (A/R) for my secondary skills. It was a very combat-focused build, but other than getting the hang of the interface elements, combat would probably be the focus of the tutorial instance, right? I mean, it appears to be a mountain meadow of wildflowers, not the city square. Monsters are more likely to appear than shopkeepers, and crafting stations generally aren’t where there aren’t people to use them.
Of course, since the skills were still level 0, they didn’t affect my attributes yet. But it was time to change that. Well, it was time to get the equipment I would use and then start leveling up my skills.
After a bit of experimentation, I figured out the trick to accessing the inventory interface, or rather the trick to putting things into the inventory. It wasn’t that hard to view the inventory—just a matter of focusing to expand the icon bar on the bottom right of my vision and then expanding the icon that looked like a bag.
Sadly, it appeared that the starting inventory was rather small. There were four rows of five boxes, one of them occupied, with some numbers along the bottom border of the window, designating maximum carrying capacity as twenty-two kilograms and displaying currency with a grand total of zero bits of copper.
Unfortunately, kilograms made no sense to me. Being raised with pounds and other American units of measurement, I didn’t have an intuitive understanding of how heavy a kilogram was or pretty much any other aspect of the metric system. Tell me twenty-something degrees, and that’s below freezing, not room temperature. Meters weren’t too much of a problem for distance, since a meterstick and a yardstick are about the same size, so the spell’s range shown earlier wasn’t incomprehensible. However, as I was thinking that, the display updated and showed the weight capacity in pounds. At 24.25 pounds unencumbered carrying capacity (half maximum), I wasn’t going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting, not without putting points into strength or taking a relevant skill. That meant being selective on loot. It also meant being selective with starting equipment. As much as I might want to take everything offered, it would just slow me down too much—even inside the inventory interface.
But that’s putting the cart before the horse. First things first, and that was investigating what was already in my inventory.
Ring of Limited Wishes (charges: 3) [Unique] [Soulbound] Wear the ring and activate with a [chant…] to gain the benefit of a limited wish. Limited wishes can grant from the following list: instantly raise the level of a known skill by 5; instantly raise the level of an obtained class by 1; instantly defeat one non-boss opponent (PvP excluded); instantly gain one level-appropriate common item of your choice; [more…] In recompense for time lost due to unforeseen errors, use the charges of this ring to gain what could have been earned while waiting.
The list of “more…” expanded to pages of possible wishes, such as for five tier one ingots or fifteen tier one flowers. There was almost nothing truly powerful or unique; it was indeed almost what it said it was, something to make up for lost time by granting three minor little boosts that shouldn’t, in theory, take all that long to earn normally.
There were, however, three exceptions that I noticed. The first two were listed in the basic description: raising a skill level or raising a class level might be easy enough to do right now, but if I saved the ring’s charges until much later, a boost from, say, skill level 50 to skill level 55 could potentially save a lot of time. The other exception was quite a bit further down the expanded list. Consuming a charge of the ring could instantly refill lost health, mana, and stamina—potentially life-saving when used at the right time, and thus potentially very powerful.
It was likely to turn into my Megalixer—Too Awesome To Use. And yet another thing tying me to this character, for I certainly wasn’t likely to get an item bound to this character transferred to another if I were to delete her and start over.
Then I read the chant needed to activate it. Face, meet palm again. This time not because of a reference to a popular game franchise, but because whoever wrote the chant made it a four-line stanza of amateur poetry. And he—or she, since it very well could have been that maid GM—shouldn’t try to write poetry, it seemed. In fact, I had my suspicion that it was her. After all, the earlier message had said that the ring was added to my inventory by her.
Before I got too far ahead of myself, though, there was something else I was really honor-bound to do. I left the ring in my inventory, added the ribbon that I was still holding from when the scroll turned into the user interface elements, and opened up the icon marked with a question mark. It was, indeed, a help menu and did, indeed, have a bug report and feedback function.
I fired off a quick report noting the three exceptions that I had noticed and querying if they were intended. It wasn’t quite like typing or writing; it wasn’t quite like speaking; it wasn’t quite like the message was generated by the function reading my thoughts. But it wasn’t quite unlike any of the three, either. I don’t know how better to explain it. What I did know, though, is that if they could figure a way to turn that messaging system into an app and market it on cell phones, they’d make a bundle. Well, beyond the bundle they’re already going to be making from the game and the FIVR pods. But then again, maybe it was only able to work due to being inside a virtual reality.
Anyway, from the treasure chest with starting equipment, I took the long bow that was taller than I was, the quiver of its arrows, a single dagger, and … for good measure, the staff. I did, after all, have a spell I could cast. The small bag turned out to contain 5 silver coins that took no inventory spot but incremented the currency display at the bottom of the inventory. And when the bag was put into my inventory, it gave me four additional spots to store things—which was good, because the potions took four spots all by themselves. Two potions, colored red, were labeled as “Basic Healing Potion (Tutorial).” The two blue ones were labeled as “Basic Mana Draught (Tutorial).” One was yellow and was a “Basic Energy Drink (Tutorial)” for recovering Stamina. And the final potion was “Weak Antivenom,” which unsettled my nerves a little bit. Status effects in the tutorial?
Inventory situated, I equipped the bow and quiver. Finally, I took a step off the platform and into the field of flowers, only to be halted by a small, piping voice behind me, “Hey, over here! Don’t forget these!”