Infinite Realms

            As I lay in my bed my head itched.  I reached back and scratched.  The hair had just started regrowing.  Even though I couldn’t reach the implant below the skull it still felt good to scratch.  As if in response to my itching Terry started scratching behind her ear furiously with her back leg as well.  I smiled at the dog.  She wasn’t mine, she belonged to Larry but followed me around.  Terry was the guard dog for the warehouses.  I think she was a German Shepard and Golden Retriever mix.  She wagged her tail as I smiled at her.  I reached over and patted her head and then laid down on my bed again. 

The headaches had passed from the surgery.   My musty pillow assaulted my nostrils as my head sank into it again.  Every since the surgery my senses were heightened.  I looked around my room. The metal walls had peeling green paint with scattered pictures of schematics taped to it, the floor had an old dirty orange area rug, the desk was covered in electronic parts, the rolling chair was covered in worn cracked brown leather, the heater was old but worked, the fridge was ancient but hummed away working, and the VR capsule was all scratched and had the panels off.  I had rebuilt the VR capsule from parts in the warehouse.  It was probably even better the current top of the line models on the market.  The thick hi-speed cable snaked out from the machine into the wall.  I had been lucky that the old control tower had a modern line before it had shut down.  This warehouse was actually an old airplane hangar.  Larry had bought the airport about twenty years ago and turned it into a junkyard.  The half dozen hangars were all filled with electronics from the last fifty years.  The runways had dozens of retired planes also filled with junk.  My ‘room’ was actually a maintenance closet in the largest hangar. 

When I was twelve, both of my parents died in a car crash.  I was in a foster home for about two weeks before I ran away.  I was crashing in one of the planes on the runway when Terry had found me, bringing Larry to investigate.  Larry was pretty understanding and gave me this room and a heater.  Over the last seven years I worked for Larry.  Fixing electronics and repairing appliances and electronics for him to sell.  I was not paid much but I had a place to sleep and learned a lot over the years.  Unfortunately for me, being uneducated and socially akward I had very little job prospects.

I rolled out of bed to the fridge and pulled a ration bar and some Fizz out.  Returning to the bed I chewed on the bar, it tasted like stale peanuts and oatmeal.  The sugary carbonated beverage washed down the meal bar and covered most of the horrible taste.  I grabbed one of my tablets and opened the browser.  Infinite Realms.  My gamble for a better life.  The new full VR game was being released tomorrow.  It had taken me almost a year to save enough money for the implant and six months to build a working VR immersion capsule from parts.  VR games were well known for making billions of dollars from the multitudes of people trying to escape the overpopulated and dying planet. 

The homepage for Infinite Realms on my tablet said 11,234,109 and was going steadily up.  It was the number of copies of the game that had been sold.  I looked at the shoebox size cartridge on the pillow next to me, my copy of the game.  Larry had bought it for me.  It was first thing of any value he had every bought for me in seven years.  I think he was proud of me, rebuilding the VR capsule and saving for the interface implant.  I returned to tablet and reviewed the general info for the game.

It was a massive game.  Overly ambitious.  In summary the game modeled on the Milky Way galaxy.  Billions of stars and thousands of light years across.  The genius of the game was that only about 150 star systems were currently active.  That meant GAIA, the governing A.I., would randomly generate new systems as they were discovered.  The game boasted that there was a 5.42% for a ‘new’ system to have habitable planets with unique or existing life.  Dead planets could also be terraformed if they were in the goldilocks zone of an appropriate star but at fantastic cost. 

You also did not have to travel the stars if you didn’t want to.  There were planets with a fantasy style setting.  Dungeons, ancient ruins, alien settlements, derelict crashed starships, wars, commerce…you had your choice of what niche you wanted to fill.  The game was complex though.  I clicked on the character statistics tab.

Strength        this will govern your physical strength and affect how much you can carry, how much damage you do with physical weapons and gives a small increase to your health

Constitution  this stat greatly affects the amount health you have and how quickly your physical body recovers from damage

Stamina          this gives points to your stamina pool which is required for physical actions and affects how quickly the stamina pool replenishes

Quickness      this affects your movement speed and can give a benefit to your defense

Precision        this stat is directed related to your ability to hit with ranged attacks and performing complex tasks

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Intellect          this ability governs your learning speed for all skills

Æther             this stat directly affects how much mana you can store

Channeling    this stat reflects how fast your Æther replenishes passively

Charisma       this stat is utilized during interactions with NPCs

Luck               sometimes skill is not enough

I read the forums on this stat based system and it was viewed with mixed reactions.  Some people hated the complexity, some people liked it.  Basically any character build would need three stats at a minimum developed.  Some more complex builds as many as six.  The magic system relied on mana generated from collected Æther which I assume was some type of energy in the game.  I didn’t read too much into it.  My focus was on my character build.  I wanted to be a starship engineer.  I figured I could get a job for a player owned corporation on a large ship and make a good wage.  It also meant I really only needed to focus on developing my intellect and precision to level up my engineering skills.  I would need to devote a few points to quickness as well.  I would be shit in any type of combat and not be able pretty much anything else but I hoped my focus would make me one of the top engineers in the game and therefore get a decent salary.  Conversion of credits to real world money would be dynamic and the game creators took the standard 15% as a processing ‘fee’ but I still was confident I could make a living.  There were after all thousands of billionaires expected to play the game and I just had to prove more valuable to hire than an NPC.

The skill system was immense.  It covered the physical, magic, tech, knowledge and social skills.  Generally there was a primary skill and sub skills below that.  A sub skill could never be more than two levels higher a primary skill.  The real kick in the ass though was the dedicated development system.  Each player could choose 3 ‘Gold’ skills that would develop 10 times faster than normal, and 23 other ‘Silver’ skills that would develop three times faster.  These skills were how you defined your character’s role in the game. 

Leveling was also present and gave you five stat points and two skill points as you progressed each level.  Leveling up skill skills also gave you bonus stat points as you leveled them but only one the skill leveled to a prime number.  The example given on the web site was for the primary skill of swimming.

SWIMMING (STR), if you don’t want to drown then learn this skill.

* +1% to swim speed per level

* +1 Strength at Prime Levels

* Novice (Level 7) +1 Stamina

* Expert (Level 23) +1 Stamina, +1 Constitution

* Master (Level 43) +2 Stamina, +1 Constitution

* Grand Master (67) +2 Stamina, +2 Constitution

You would think it would be a great way to increase your stats.  But if swimming is not one of your preferred skills it would take about 60 hours of practice to reach the novice level of 7 to gain 5 strength and 1 constitution.  There are ways to speed up the process, combat, utilizing a teacher and manuals.  Combat depends on the ‘danger’ level of the encounter.  A teacher’s effectiveness is dependent on how much higher level in the skill they are than the student.  And manuals cost credits, bring a skill up one point and are also rated Novice, Expert and Master.  A novice manual can only bring a skill up to level 7, expert to level 23, and master to level 43.  Manuals take about an hour to digest and are deleted or destroyed once they are used once.  A specific manual can also only be used once by each person.  So a rich bugger couldn’t buy 7 swimming manuals and then use them all to raise his skill to 7.  He could buy a Novice, Expert and Master manual and raise his skill from 0 to 3 I suppose. 

The skill system also had very slow development.  Accordingly to the web site it would take 22 days of straight practice to raise a skill to level 23, the expert level.  And that involves practicing 24 hours a day.  Not my idea of fun.  But if that skill was one of your three gold skills then you could effectively get it to expert level in about 52 hours.  With hundreds of skills it meant players would have to focus.  I already had my three Gold skills planned.  Electronics, Mechanical, Computers.  I would then use my 23 Silver skills to select sub skills from these primary skills.  I planned to be a starship rat.

My finger brushed the races tab by accident on the tablet.  I was already planning to choose a human avatar.  There were only four stellar races currently in the game.  More would be added as sentient races reached the stars or were discovered in the galaxy.  They were human, augment, scro and elfling.  Humans controlled about 60% of the ‘known’ systems and had about a dozen factions.  Augments were humans who had split from humanity.  They were a genetic mix of humans and another species, bearmen, werewolf, catmen, lizardmen, frogmen…I wide range.  They could be found as slaves in human controlled space or freemen if the laws allowed it.  The Scro were orcs.  They controlled 20% of the known systems.  They had a caste system, warrior, scholar, aristocrat and theocrat.  They were very war like as is typical of the fantasy orc.  The last race was the elves and they had three sub-races.  Green elves who preferred planet based living, Void elves who preferred living in space and Æther elves who had a strong connection to magic.  I did not read much of the game’s backstory but basically the elves and Scro had been battling for centuries.  The humans were empire building and internal fighting collapsed the Empire and it split into a dozen smaller Empires.  Travel between the stars takes time but there are Interstellar Gates.  These gates are ancient technology and cannot be destroyed.  Any ‘new’ gates built by NPCs or Players would be susceptible to destruction.  One of the games goals was to explore the stars and find other gates and activate them, adding them to the network.  Stardrives rely of tech and magic to travel faster than the speed of light.  The games webpage didn’t give too much info on this but mentioned speed was limited to about 400 times the speed of light with ‘current’ tech.  It meant explorers were going to be spending a lot of time twiddling their thumbs.