“Hey! Congratulations! You’re getting stronger. You know, you might be able to investigate where these big meanies are coming from and stop them at their source—”
I held up my left hand in the nigh-universal wait-a-moment gesture. “Whoa, whoa. Can you let me process my level-up stuff first before you offer me the next quest? Otherwise, I might forget something….”
She pouted slightly but nodded, continuing on in a teasing tone that was perhaps a little strained. “Fine. I’ll wait for you to catch up with things, slowpoke.”
I let her remark slide and willed open my status screen. Judging by the message earlier, leveling up was a somewhat slow process, which made the attribute points a much more valuable resource—I wouldn’t be getting very many of them very quickly—so a little thought needed to be put into how to best use them, lest I do something impulsive and dump them all into Charisma to boost my cute power or something equally not optimal.
I considered my skills. Archery would give me Agility and a bit of Reflexes as it leveled up, Gathering would give me Brilliance and a bit of Luck, and my recent Spellcasting skill would give Brilliance and … more Brilliance. That was five of the nine attributes covered, though maybe Luck wasn’t that important.
Strength wasn’t important to my fighting style so far, and while my inventory was starting to fill up with plants and rat parts (pelts and bones only, fortunately), I wasn’t anywhere near where it got too heavy. Perhaps it would help with the draw of the bow, but I wanted to see if leveling up the Archery skill further helped with that before spending limited points on Strength.
Endurance seemed mostly for health and stamina. Well, it had a host of other things associated with it, but none of those had really come into play yet. As long as I took breaks to recover mana in between fights instead of rushing from fight to fight, I wasn’t yet in danger of running low on stamina and none of the rats had yet managed to hit me, so I also wasn’t yet in danger of running low on health. It wasn’t an attribute I really needed to focus on just now.
Willpower was probably one of my highest immediate priorities as it would increase the amount of mana I had and thus the number of Mistshards I could cast. If I continued with having spells be a large part of my fighting style (and if abilities granted by skills cost mana), it would be something I needed to consistently invest in, maybe even with also having a skill that raised Willpower as well.
Defense, like Endurance, hadn’t really come into play so far. Besides, with my armor, slight as it was, Defense was my highest modified attribute at a total of 17; the next highest were 14s. If monster started hitting me, I might need to invest in the attribute, but for now it was something I felt I could safely skip.
That left Charisma, an almost entirely non-combat type of attribute. Slight earlier snark aside, Charisma was often an underappreciated stat in many games. Better reactions from NPCs generally meant more quests offered (with possibly better rewards), better prices for buying and selling, and—often—entirely different dialogue options. Granted, actually being in the gameworld instead of just seeing it on screen meant that players weren’t limited to a handful or fewer choices on what to say to an NPC, but the principle held. If I remembered correctly, the information I had read earlier specifically mentioned that Charisma also affected reputation loss and gain. Since I had Destiny’s Designer, the perk reward from the unique achievement I had earned from spending so much time playing with character creation, I could do one of two things: I could skimp on Charisma since the perk would help offset the lack or I could raise Charisma each level in order to play to my strengths.
I played to my strengths. Well, not entirely. I had to consider where I was now, in the tutorial instance, and had to keep in mind that Charisma would certainly not let me talk my way out a fight with a rat. Nor was trying to negotiate with a rat likely to have any result. Thus, I only put two points into Charisma. The other three went into Willpower, giving me six additional mana and bringing my total up to … 31?
New base Willpower was 14. That was ten to start, one point from the first five unassigned points I had started with, and three points just now. Add to that one point from my Heroine title, currently hidden, and that gave me a modified Willpower of 15. Double fifteen is thirty, so where did the extra point of mana come from?
Nevermind. Health had increased by one point, too. And I had just leveled up. Apparently, character level contributed directly, albeit minorly, to health and mana.
I could tell that Sunrise Sparkle was getting a bit impatient to tell me my next quest, so I stopped what I was doing and looked to her. “Hey—I mean, okay. There’s something else I still need to do, but I might need to ask you about it, so please continue what you were going to say earlier.”
“Hmmph! Here! Just have the quest.” Her expression was now more than just slightly pouty, and she turned her back to me, floating off my shoulder with a dispirited pose.
“…” Now I felt bad. I sidestepped and turned to face her, but she just turned her back to me again.
“I was the top in my class, you know.” Her voice was a bit listless, lacking the energy and exuberance from earlier. “I, we—that is, those chosen to be part of the Tutorial Experience And Starting Expert program—we’re not like those who are born when a Traveller first arrives in their home instance. We existed here before even the Heralds came to warn the towns and cities and villages and homes that Travellers from another world would soon be arriving in ours.
“I wanted to meet new people, and I wanted to help new people. We were told that Travellers come from a very different world, and they would need help learning about ours. But no one wants to learn; they just want to do their own things. They only ask a question if they get confused or stuck. One person kept trying to hit me with his sword. Another kept telling me to ‘shut up!’ Most ignored me, but two of them kept trying to grab me while having really perverted expressions on their faces. Then I got you, a girl, looking younger than my twelve cycles of the seasons, and I thought ‘This time will be different.’ This time will be like the young Nekoun three seasons ago. You listen sometimes like she did, but mostly not. But you don’t really talk except when you want something. And you won’t even look at me!” She burst out crying, great wailing sobs, and her following words were drowned under a deluge of tears.
I felt three inches tall, and not in the suddenly-turned-into-a-little-faerie fashion. Here was a young girl (even if faeries aged differently), taking on adult responsibilities, having a very bad day, and I may have just put the final nail in the coffin of her dreams. It hit me especially hard since I, too, had trained to be a teacher before the lottery win meant I didn’t have to work anymore. And even then, I had still been spending a few hours each week at the local library, reading to kids, and helping the really young ones with their homework.
More than slightly misty-eyed myself, as if heartbreak were contagious, I stepped around to in front of her and squatted down so I could look up at her and catch her downturned gaze. “I’m sorry,” I said, voice slightly wavering, “I’m sorry. You are right, and I was wrong. I was incredibly rude, treating you like a help menu, uh, like an encyclopedia rather than like a person.”
She was too small to gather into a hug; doing so might have hurt her. So, I fully sat, hugging my knees to my chest, and tapped a knee lightly. “Come, sit down, and let’s talk. You sound like you’ve had a really horrible day.”
She looked at me, sniffling, and floated down to land on that knee—without any of her usual aerobatic gymnastic dance-style moves. She sat, and mirrored my pose, hugging her knees to her chest. I made sure to look at her, eye-to-eye, even if I was more than peripherally aware of her silvery, clingy leotard.
We sat like that for I don’t know how many hours, talking. At first, mostly her talking with me listening, commiserating, and making sounds as appropriate. Unfortunately, the scale between us wouldn’t work for me being a shoulder to cry on. Her story … it made me a bit ashamed, not just to really be a man outside this avatar from the way those two had tried to grope her, but also to really be a human. Almost everyone she had encountered had treated her like a game object. I had done the same, and I knew better, after having interacted more with Jasmine in the home instance than probably most other players had with their AI assistant. If I could see Jasmine as being her own unique, individual, special person, then there was no reason to not see Sunrise Sparkle the same way. From our standpoint as players, they were artificial intelligences, but all too many of us had been focusing on the first word, artificial, rather than recognizing the significance of the second word, intelligence.
I learned a lot about her type of faerie, the Elionne. As I had seen from that first Inspect, they were part of the Elemental Fae Archetype, but there was so much more than just that. From what I was told, Elionne represent the element of Light (though seemed, to me, almost a nature spirit), and spring into existence, fully formed, every three or four years when a certain type of lily first blooms in its quest to seek the glow of the three moons that shone in Se’Terrakai’s sky. The Elionne may be fully formed physically, but they’re almost a blank slate mentally. While they don’t have a community of sorts, in almost every generation, two or more stay to tend the flowers and impart knowledge to their newly formed cousins who stay a year—a cycle of seasons—then the newly formed travel, seeking new sights, new sounds, new scents, new tastes, new lights, and new experiences. Then, every twelve to sixteen years, four generations, that generation disappears, ceasing to exist as suddenly as they came into being.
Sunrise Sparkle believed that their spirits return to “The River of Souls,” flowing around the world, and drawn from time to time into new beings when various races, animals, monsters, or plants are born or created. I was a bit agnostic about religion in general, but saw no reason why something like that couldn’t be how developers designed the game world. Maybe not plants or regular animals, but anything that needed a full-fledged AI to control it….
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
It was another blow to realize that this faerie was literally spending the last years of her life doing not stuff for herself but for others, for those of us arriving, “travelling,” from the real world. No, better would be to say from the non-virtual world. She was so very giving of herself, and yet all she got back in return was disdain, assault, or avoidance.
As time progressed, it became more and more me talking, answering her questions, doing my best to explain the possibilities for why people had acted to her the way they had. She had trouble with some concepts, like sexual attraction or like how many, maybe even most, Travellers would think of her and the others in the world as “not real.” For the first, since Elionne sprang into existence without the need of mothers and fathers, it was a concept almost wholly foreign to her.
Finally, as she was starting to understand it, she asked as question that struck a nigh-mortal wound to my manly pride. “But, you’re a girl, so it shouldn’t matter, right?”
How to answer that? Since she’s had problems with men, would it be bad for her to know who I really am? Or would it be worse to let her continue with her mistaken beliefs and thus set her up for a potential feeling of betrayal later? When does it become a lie of commission instead of omission? What’s the boundary for “little white lies”?
“Sunrise Sparkle,” I said gently, “Girls can still be attracted to girls. Also, remember how I said that the world that Travellers come from doesn’t have all the other races? No Tauros, no faeries, no elves, and so on? All the people are humans?”
She nodded.
“So, I’m not really a Tauros; I’m a human in my world. And, just like we can become different races when we come here, we’re allowed to change—”
She interrupted, looking up at me with cheeks streaked with tear marks, but eyes no longer crying and now showing curiosity. “So you’re a boy human who chose to become a girl Tauros? Why? Do you like it?”
SWOOSH—Her questions were like arrows arcing into my manly pride, and with far better aim than I had with my longbow. “Yes. Well, um, not exactly. And that’s too many questions.” I took a deep breath. “Yes, I am a ‘boy human,’ well better to say ‘male’ rather than ‘boy’; I’m older than I look now. And I didn’t exactly choose to become a Tauros girl, that sort of just happened, but due to circumstances, I chose to stay like this.” I sighed softly and looked out into the distance, before continuing the explanation. We talked about things that Jasmine had told me, how I didn’t feel out of place because the game systems made the bodies feel normal. We talked about how things like clothing or questions focused my awareness on my body, but that for the most part, I wasn’t spending my time dwelling on the differences between Madelyn Alexis and my non-virtual body. I wasn’t “completely a girl” but I also wasn’t “a boy in a girl’s body”—I was just … well, just me.
And as for the second concept … why many, maybe even most, Travellers might see her and others as “not real,” it was far harder to explain. She didn’t have video games as a frame of reference, and Elionne culture didn’t even have play-pretend games like “cops and robbers” or “let’s play house.” She may have been top in her class of faeries trained to be tutorial assistants, but the education she was given was fairly lacking. She didn’t know a lot about Travellers, but instead seemed to have been taught about the systems and skills and questlines that Travellers would need or want to know to succeed in the tutorial. I hoped that the other faeries were faring better, but I was afraid that Sunrise Sparkle’s experience would prove to be the rule and not the exception.
Finally, part of the explanation seemed to spark some understanding. “So, Travellers think we’re all just a dream, a dream that continues when they go back to sleep again?”
“I, umm…. Well, that’s the best I can think of to compare it to. Maybe, perhaps even probably, as they continue to interact with others in ECHO, they’ll start to see that you and others are people and not just imaginary things. But I feel bad for you and the other tutorial assistants; you all have to see and interact with us before we learn that.”
She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she stood up and looked me eye-to-eye. “Thank you, Madelyn Alexis. I think I understand a bit better now. If you were Elionne, you’d make a very good D’skala-mi’tera. It’s hard to translate. They’re the Elionne who return or stay to help teach the new generations.” I felt a slight swell of pride. She paused for a moment, looking skyward, and perhaps accessing something to help her translate, much like the slight pause Jasmine had when discussing the cost of changing a hivatar.
“Ah, I have it. It’s not quite the same, since we’re different. But you might say ‘teacher of the very young’ or maybe ‘mother’ in the nurturing sense and not relationship sense. But, hey!” and in a twinkle she went from contemplative back to her original energetic and cheerful self, though there was a slight edge to it, as if she was wearing it like a mask. “We’ve been talking a loooooong time; I should give you the quest now! I’m sorry for taking so much of your time and doubting you!”
“That’s…. That’s okay, Sunrise Sparkle. It was understandable, and I think we needed to spend the time talking.” I stifled a yawn even as my slight swell of pride became a tangled, confused mess. On one hand, it felt good, validating even, to be regarded as a potential ‘teacher of the very young’ since that was what I had trained for and that was what I was volunteering my time as at the library. On the other hand, being seen as a potential mother was … complicated. Along with that was a touch of indirect shame that “parent” wasn’t in the running as a translation possibility as our non-virtual culture didn’t really allow fathers to be nurturing. However, I didn’t allow the complicated confusion to show on my face as I stood, saying, “And I’m sorry for being so focused on myself and my goals that I was treating you rudely.”
But weighty issues aside, she was right—time for the quest!
System Message: You have been offered a quest by Sunrise Sparkle, your fairy assistant in the tutorial. [Accept] [Cannot Decline]
* Something Whiskered This Way Comes: Investigate the source of the Mountain Meadow Rat population explosion. Reward: One common ring. // U P D A T I N G . . . // Quest reward overwritten. Reward: *pending authorization* // U P D A T I N G . . . // Quest reward replacement authorized. Reward: One [hidden] taught by Sunrise Sparkle.
I blinked, but didn’t feel like it was quite the appropriate time to ask about the weirdness for the text about the reward. Later, I could mention it in another bug report or feedback. I’d need to write one anyway, just to make sure that the developers are aware of the problems that Sunrise Sparkle faced with earlier players and that the potential exists for other faeries to be likewise affected.
“Just…. Just ‘investigate,’” I inquired. “I don’t need to actually do anything about it?”
“Hey! This is to introduce Travellers to the idea of chained and branching quest lines. After you investigate the source, you’ll be given a new quest to do something about it. The something will depend on your actions up to that point.”
Her verbal trademark was back though it had been almost entirely absent during our more serious conversation. Perhaps it was part of the “protocol” she had mentioned before when she hadn’t taught me about skill guides until after three attempts to shoot the target, something that she was required to do in her role as a Tutorial Experience And Starting Expert. Honestly, I couldn’t find her use of it annoying anymore, not after the heart-to-heart we had, but it was something else to add to the feedback. Were the developers actively trying to make these poor faeries disliked?
“Okay. I think I get it. Would you mind if I hunted some more rats and gathered some more plants first? I think I’d like to get a little bit stronger before going toward what sounds like a boss fight.”
“You will probably have to anyway to help you locate the source.” She kept glancing to the north as she was talking, “but thank you for asking. Oh, hey! Didn’t you have a question you were going to ask before we, uh, before I, well…?” She trailed off.
“Oh, that’s right, I did. Thank you.” I smiled at her. “Sorry, since I’m getting sleepy, it slipped my mind. So, Spellcasting should give me a modifier now that it reached level 1, but … what are modifiers? And how are they used?”
“Hey! Good question. You can select your new modifier by expanding the information for the skill. Modifiers change something about your spells, maybe make them cheaper or faster or more powerful or somehow better. Spells start with the ability to be modified once but usually get additional modifier spots as they level up. Any spell you have can use any modifier you know; they’re not like equipment that gets used up. But if you want to change the modifiers a spell has, then you cannot use the spell for a while—it goes on a long cooldown. The bigger the change, the longer it takes, so be careful later!” She gestured expansively, “But don’t worry, going from no modifiers at all to using the first one is very, very short: like five seconds.”
While she was talking, she brought open my character screen and caused the Spellcasting skill to expand, showing me the list of possible modifiers I could learn. There were about a dozen shown, but several times that just listed as “[Locked].”
“These locked ones,” I asked, “when do they become unlocked? I think I get a new modifier at Spellcasting 10?”
“Yep! Well, some will become unlocked then. Others at 20, 30, or so on. Some other ones have other requirements, such as having one or more other modifiers learned or being able to use certain types of magic, or so on. There’s really a lot of different things. No one can learn them all so everyone will probably be a bit different!”
Well, that’s true for now, but later when people start writing min-maxing guides, that might change. But even at Spellcasting level 100, that would be only eleven different modifiers. There were more than eleven that I could already choose from: Increased Range, Increase Restoration, Increased Damage, Sniping, Point-Blank, Decreased Cost, etc.
I had two things to consider with my choice. The first—the spell I already had. “Reduced Cast Time” wouldn’t be very useful on a spell that had a cast time of zero, for instance, so I’d need to choose something I could use immediately. The second, though—the spells I might learn in the future. With a very limited amount of modifiers, choosing something that offered flexibility might be more important that choosing something that offered power, at least for the first modifier. Something like “Increased Damage” would maybe make Mistshard so much nicer now, but it wouldn’t do anything for healing, buffing, debuffing, or other utility spells like Invisibility or Teleport (if such existed) later on.
Consequently, I chose “Increased Spell Potency,” which would make the spells’ effects stronger. It wouldn’t increase a spell’s damage to the same extent that “Increased Damage” would do, and it wouldn’t increase a spell’s healing power the amount “Increased Restoration” would, but it would do both, and more besides, depending on what the base spell did: stronger buffs, harder-to-resist effects, that sort of thing. Granted, that was the base effect from Spellcasting already—spells would become more potent as the skill leveled—but this meant that any spells I might learn between now and reaching skill level 10 wouldn’t have to remain without modifiers if bonus damage wasn’t applicable to them.
Slotting it to Mistshard increased both the healing and damage it could do by one point. It didn’t just raise the maximum, but also the minimum. So, instead of “5-7 damage” or “6-8 health” it was now “6-8 damage” or “7-9 health.” Presumably, as Brilliance got higher, those ranges would also increase, but so far they hadn’t. I also had a feeling that the modifier was an additional percentage, so as the base damage range increased, the amount granted by the modifier would also increase. However, I had no way to check that yet.
Problems probably resolved and character maintenance from leveling completed, we—Sunset Sparkle and I—set out to slay more rats and gather more plants. This time, however, it wasn’t just focusing on the game, but rather we talked. Trivial things, mostly, and nothing to deal with hunting, gathering, or game systems. She talked about her life before hearing about Travellers and applying to the class to learn to guide us, and I talked about the non-virtual world, mostly about my sister and me.