The place Victoria had in mind turned out to be a small malt shop, looking very close to what one would see in a movie or show set in the 1930s or ‘40s. There was a long, white marble counter with a baker’s dozen red-upholstered spinning stools, most of which were occupied. A gleaming chrome-and-red-plastic jukebox playing scratchy vinyl oldies stood at the far end of the counter. There were another dozen sweetheart chairs paired up around small, round tables Those tables were immaculate and topped with the same gleaming white marble as the counter was. And along the wall were a handful of booths that could sit four to six on a curved bench around a half-moon table. Two booths were occupied, with one having a barely visible, shimmering curtain of light surrounding the booth and occupants.
Victoria noticed my gaze. “Privacy screen,” she explained. “Sometimes people will discuss work over a malt or soda, and a lot of that doesn’t need to be heard by others. ‘Need to know’ and all that: finances, upcoming events, you know. Also personal matters. Some things are better discussed informally over ice cream rather than in some formal office setting.”
Together, we went to one of the booths, the last in the line. As we were sitting, the first person (besides me) that I had seen not dressed as either a maid or butler appeared. She was an older woman—matronly, with grey hair, and with a faded beauty that suggested that she had been quite the head-turner in her youth. Her outfit was a simple yet stylish, deep pine green dress that reached just past her knees. “Well, well, Victoria. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen you last. And who is this with you?” She turned slightly to peer at me.
“This is the player of Madelyn Alexis, who is doing some modeling work for a project my department is running,” Victoria answered.
“Just ‘Alexis’ is fine,” I said. I mean, at this point, it was really a bit of “When in Rome….” True, this form didn’t officially have a name beyond my own, not like my hivatar or game avatar, but I couldn’t keep being referred to as “the player of…” or some such. It was just unwieldy. And the “Miss Starlight” I had been called the other day, based on my hivatar’s name, was almost as awkward.
“So, Alexis, very nice to meet you. I’m Megan, and I run this little establishment. Do you ladies know what you want, or shall I give you some time to decide?”
“Ummmm….” Megan hadn’t even given us menus. Nor was there a menu board and pricing list above the counter.
“If it’s a malt, float, shake, or sundae, Megan can make it,” Victoria told me.
“In that case, how about a root beer float?” I said.
When we were growing up, my twin and I hadn’t had many desserts, maybe four or five times a month at most: pineapple chunks in orange jello typically; a scoop of ice cream and a slice or two of homemade pie for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter meals at my grandmother’s place; or maaaybe a pastry cut in halves or thirds and shared around the table. However, it had been tradition that we would have floats on New Year’s Eve when we had stayed up late to watch the Space Needle’s televised fireworks.
Like desserts, soda pop hadn’t been common in our house. My mother had slowly sipped a diet cola every morning, but the only other soda pop in the house (except for New Year’s) had been generic, store-brand, lemon-lime soda for when we were sick. As for the floats, when we were younger, my twin and I had prefered the sweeter sodas—strawberry for me and orange or grape for her—but from about sixth grade on, we had reverted to the family tradition.
Therefore, a root beer float, to me, was the epitome of ‘fancy dessert.’ Lex and I still continued the New Year’s tradition, but I did treat myself to one every now and then even without a holiday or special occasion to celebrate. Being rich, I could afford to, now.
“Sounds good. I’ll have one, too,” Victoria added.
Megan smiled, nodded, and returned to behind the counter. Before I could do more than look around a little bit and try to identify the song (or at least the singer) that the jukebox was playing, she was back again.
Each float was served in a tall, fluted crystal cup that would have belonged in a museum or a millionaire collector’s fancy china cabinet had they not been virtual. In addition to the floats, there were two tall uncorked bottles of root beer and a metal tin looking like a small, covered dairy bucket which turned out to contain extra ice cream. “Here you go, ladies. Enjoy! Holler if you need anything else.” And Megan was gone again, back to shop’s counter.
“Megan was one of the company’s early efforts in AI, before we had the game world itself going. She doesn’t like numbers, so she declined a role in managing the world and instead is apparently satisfied with designing and running this place. That dislike for numbers means that she doesn’t even deal with pretend currency here.”
“I’m glad she found something she liked to do, then. Math and management aren’t for everyone.”
Victoria nodded and between sips of our floats, we chatted a little about the early days of the game and its world. One thing I learned from her was that a lot of the background and lore of the world wasn’t designed by any developer. Instead, they had cobbled together the geography of the world, set the conditions for several of the races and species, and then run the whole thing as a high-speed simulation, pausing from time to time to interfere with world events or rewinding the simulation to tweak parameters and set precursors for certain storylines: omens, disasters, legendary artifacts, half-forgotten heroes, and so on. It had taken several hundred runs through the simulation before they had gotten to a point where they were comfortable with using what developed as a starting point for the game.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
As a consequence of ECHO’s procedurally generated history, there were innumerable things in the world and its background that weren’t collated in an internal wiki or design document. Victoria mentioned, for instance, whole archipelagos of island ruins, testaments to lost civilizations, with plenty for folk to explore and discover. That type of beyond-the-horizon exploration was some of what she did when she was playing on her non-GM character.
The conversation then drifted from past to present, and Victoria activated the privacy screen. Before I could raise a question—indeed, before I could do much more than raise a brow—she said, “So … Alexis …,” and hesitated a moment, looking and sounding unusually reticent or maybe abashed. For a brief and uncertain moment, I half-harbored a thought that she was going to ask me out. Depending on one’s point-of-view, this after-work meeting in a malt shop might already be counted as a date of sorts….
Then she continued speaking and I buried that half-formed impression and quarter-formed response. “We—that is, mostly Gawain and Nazhai’s folks—looked into the issues you had brought up as well as some other things that came about as a result of our investigation, and, well…. It seems you’ve been hit with the short end of the stick, and we might need to rectify it.”
With the abrupt change from my initial impression to her actual comment, my response wasn’t particularly elegant: “Huh?”
“Mister Taylor,” she began with an unreadable expression, stressing the gendered title. “You told us during the investigation that you hadn’t actually chosen to play a Tauros character but felt constrained to keep her due to the bonuses that you had received. What you didn’t tell us, but did tell your TEASE, was that not only were you not planning on playing a Tauros character, but also that you weren’t planning on playing a female character. Correct?”
“Uhmmm….” I could feel my cheeks burning red, and not even a sip from the root beer float could cool them. “Yeah,” I answered softly. “ I didn’t go into things planning on being a girl in the game. It sort of happened.”
“Or the home instance and your hivatar?” she inquired.
“Well, that’s different. I wasn’t planning on it, either. I just wasn’t specific enough, I guess, when I asked to be able to understand her language.”
Victoria nodded and shrugged slightly. “Well, okay. We’ll come back to that in a moment. The important thing is … when you entered the tutorial as Madelyn Alexis, you hadn’t been intending to do so, and you hadn’t received a confirmation prompt, correct?”
Nodding, I answered “That’s right.”
“Can I ask what you would have made as your character?”
“Well, I don’t think I was still completely decided yet between human—for the Adaptability racial—or an Elf of some sort for their racial. Bonus experience gain and a free perk or bonus MP and a free spell both sounded good. I hadn’t settled on a subrace, but probably the crafting humans, Acosazi were they? For the elves, maybe Wood Elves for the stealth or Sea Elves for, well, for the ocean. I’m a coastal kid. Always have been and always will.”
She smiled a little bit when I mentioned the Sea Elves. Perhaps that was the subrace of elf she was. “And you would have been male?” She wasn’t letting up on this line of questioning. Maybe it was cycling back to dating after all….
“Yeah. Well, 99.44% yeah, anyway. Maybe if I had chosen an elf, I might have gone with ‘one thing is different, why not two things, too?’ on the spur of the moment. But it wasn’t in the plan, no. At least, insomuch as I had a plan beyond agility and arrows.” My manly pride would have taken a hit on that admission, even if I had fudged the numbers a bit upward, but it was still in shock at having had fun at the modeling session. I could imagine it with the swirling stars icon of being stunned.
Victoria nodded to herself, as if my response had confirmed her expectations.
“So to lay it out, here’s what we found,” she said. “You should have received a confirmation prompt before loading into the tutorial as Madelyn Alexis. Your AI assistant suppressed that prompt, somehow. She shouldn’t have had the authority to do so, and that is still being investigated, but she explained to us that she did so for your benefit. She could see the queue and knew that if you entered it about the time you did, you’d be the 50,000th created character. Actually, you would have been the 49,979th created character, but she delayed your insertion into the queue to just the right moment.”
I sat back, somewhat stunned. “You’re saying that I shouldn’t have been made a Heroine?” Well, she was saying more than that, but if I hadn’t had that—and a few other things, true—then I could have logged out and recreated a different character with no problems.
Victoria waggled a hand, “Yes and no. You would not have been the 50,000th, but if you had made the character you wanted and logged in with him, who knows if you would have been maybe the 80,000th or something. Also, to clarify, we’re not saying you cheated, Mister Taylor.”
“Thank you for that.” It was still weird being called ‘Mister Taylor’. Besides being a girl at the moment, I was half-expecting Noabelle to come in and protest that it should be ‘Uncle’ instead—or maybe ‘Auntie,’ considering how I currently appeared. Sitting up straight again, and leaning forward a little, I asked, “but what about the person who should have been number 50,000?”
“I can set your mind at ease on that. The player deleted his character after about fifteen minutes of playing in the tutorial and hasn’t yet recreated one. So it’s not like he’s missing what he could have had.
“Anyway,” Victoria continued. “That’s neither here nor there at the moment. The point is that the other things, the compensation ring, the Image is Everything achievement, and so on … those should have, maybe with GM help, been able to be moved to a new character if you had deleted Madelyn Alexis and restarted. If you hadn’t been a Heroine, they shouldn’t have been what were keeping you as a character you hadn’t intended to play. But honestly, if things had gone as they were supposed to have, you wouldn’t have been in that situation, and you would have received the ring and cheevo on the character you had actually intended to play.”
“So, you’re saying…?” I prompted.
She took another sip of her float, set it down, and looked me in the eye. “Because of the circumstances surrounding your situation, Heraldic Echo will allow you to delete and recreate your character. You’ll keep your achievements, perks, and so on—including credit for slaying Sar’Glagalth—but your inventory will be partially reset. Unless you want to keep the new clothes you bought, they’ll be removed and your money returned. You don’t have to return to the tutorial, and you can choose a new starting location if you like.”
Wide-eyed, I sat back in the booth again as I processed the offer Victoria had just made.