Jasper and Rosalind walked for hours, heading towards the objective marker that showed up on both of their maps. Jasper had tried a few times now to escape home, but each time he found himself materializing beside Rosalind once he broached the 1-km barrier. He was, for the time being, a broken man.
“Cheer up glum glum,” said Rosalind. “We’re entering the parts of the game that I designed. We can breeze through this in no time.”
“Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”
“Yeesh, channeling your inner Squall Leonhart I see. Worry not friend, it’ll all be over soon.”
–
After a lengthy, mostly silent trek, Rosalind and Jasper arrived at the location of the objective marker - a town. They were greeted by an eccentric gentleman standing at the entrance, dressed in noble gear.
“Welcome one and all, to the town of Alexandria!”
Without missing a beat, Rosalind pulled out a shimmering, magnetic-looking pen from her pocket and softly tapped it against the skull of the man. The tap caused him to freeze in place as a square appeared beside him, almost like a speech bubble, with lines of code running through it.
While the man looked real enough, Rosalind knew that this gent was actually a friendly NPC who had been lovingly nicknamed Danny Doorstep by the developers. This pen was one of a few useful tools she had at her disposal from her time at XPeriential. She perused the code, and as it eventually started displaying all of Danny’s dialogue options, she slowed it down so that she could review the text carefully. Danny Doorstep’s dialogue, if ever you were so lucky, would sometimes include hints for where useful gear and items were scattered about the town.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m…” Rosalind started, but then she noticed that Jasper was standing still with his eyes closed - the poor fella was at the tail end of a long day.
She tugged him forward to wake him up, and he jolted back to awareness as they ventured deeper into the town.
–
Rosalind and Jasper shuffled into a gorgeous Inn located at the center of the town. It was large and cozy, running four stories high, filled to the brim with amenities and adorned with a rustic feel that permeated every nook and cranny, from the weathered wooden beams to the antique furnishings.
At the front desk was a man who looked equally miserable as Jasper, and funny enough, a man who Jasper seemed to recognize near-immediately. As if he were primed to suck out the remaining soul of the fellow at the counter like an energy vampire, Jasper approached him jovially.
“No way, this absolutely cannot be. Is that you Jeff?!”
Jeff sighed as he delivered a canned response. “Welcome to the Alexandria Inn. Won’t you rest your heart and soul here for the evening? It’ll only cost ya 25 Silver. What do you say?”
“What do I say?! My goodness Jeff.” Jasper turned to Rosalind. “Jeff has been my longtime rival at the university - he teaches in the same department I do. Every single opportunity he gets, he dogs me for thinking that Kafka’s writing is the greatest in the universe.”
“I’m not saying Kafka’s bad, he’s just a little overrated,” Jeff responded.
“Well that’s great Jeff! But guess what. I’m a main character now and you’ve been assigned to hotel duties! Your poor life choices and terrible taste in literature have brought you here.” Jasper turned to Rosalind. “Hand me your pen.”
“My pen? Why? Wait, weren't you sleeping when I was using it?”
“I was multitasking. And now, with your permission, I’d like to humiliate this man standing before us.”
Rosalind hesitated for a moment, but, seeing the faint spark in Jasper’s eyes, decided to give him the shot in the arm he needed and handed him the instrument.
Jasper reached over the counter and tapped Jeff on the forehead with the pen. No text or code appeared.
“What’s this?!” Jasper recoiled in fake shock. “Why, here you are doing NBC duties -”
“NPC,” Rosalind corrected -
“NPC duties, but according to this magical device, which has been coded by the finest scientists in the land, you’re a real person! Hmm, I suppose there really could only be one rational explanation for this: the game took stock of who you are as a human being, ran a series of brilliant tests with its unparalleled algorithms, and ultimately deduced that innkeeping was a much more suitable profession for you than teaching!” Jasper turned to Rosalind and smiled. “And the rest, of course, is history.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Jeff was steaming, but he held back. “A night’s stay is 25 silver. Does that work for you?” he asked, between clenched teeth.
“That depends,” said Jasper. “Is there dinner?”
–
Jasper and Rosalind sat across from each other at a small table in a buzzing dining hall. The hall was packed with people dressed in rustic regalia, as if they’d just stepped out from a medieval re-enactment. Also scattered about the room were folks who looked as though they’d come here straight from a 9-5 shift at a fancy, open-office tech company. The two worlds melded together quite nicely actually.
“So, have you ever thought of therapy?”
“Nope,” replied Jasper hastily, working away at his pulled pork with a side of potatoes.
“Might be a good idea once this is all over. Your behavior with that guy you knew was… kinda toxic. Not really healthy to have a bitter rivalry with a coworker, ya know?”
“Well I mean, it seems like all of your coworkers are ghosting you at the moment. Maybe we have more in common than you’d like to think.”
Rosalind slammed her fist on the table. A small splash of vegetable soup erupted from her bowl, scattering droplets that speckled the oak surface of the table with stains. “They’ll answer,” she said firmly. Her brief outburst caught no attention from the room, as loud drunkards shouting by the bar were doing their part to drown out the quieter exchanges in the dining area.
Jasper changed the subject. “So has this town always existed?”
Rosalind guffawed, almost spitting out her mouthful of stew. “Are you serious?!”
“What?! It’s an honest question.”
Rosalind shook her head, tsking. “Professor, you are one sheltered man.”
Jasper’s befuddled expression remained, prompting Rosalind to get up from her seat, pull out her pen, and maneuver around the hall. As she did, she gently tapped the heads of the drunkards at the bar, the hands of a lovely couple who were staring deep into each other’s eyes over a chocolate fondue, and finally the backs of two men dressed in chivalric attire who were in the middle of a heated argument. With every instance of tapping, a block of code appeared beside each pen-marked person.
Having demonstrated her point, she sat down.
“They’re all…?” Jasper started.
“NPCs. That’s right. You’d think you would’ve been able to tell by their old-world outfits.”
Rosalind eyed Jasper, now remembering that her introduction to him was in the form of him donning a full suit of armor. She went to tap her pen on him, but he swatted at the air as soon as he saw the thought form in her eyes. She giggled.
“Only kidding,” she said. “I’d say that probably half of the people in this room are NPCs. The others, who I’m sure you can tell just by looking at how they’re dressed, are real people from our real world. And now you’re probably wondering, why are real people from our real world hanging out here? Maybe it’s safe?” Rosalind smirked. “Maybe they already lived here in the first place?”
Jasper wasn’t quite getting it, so Rosalind spelled it out.
“This town was for sure a modern city before. It got morphed into a medieval-looking fantasy town for the sake of the game, and judging by what happened to your innkeeper friend, there’s probably a bunch of real people who were forced into some non-important but inescapable NPC roles in the game’s narrative.”
“And what? Now they’re just stuck in that NPC role?” Jasper asked.
Rosalind slurped her soup. “Until the game’s over, yeah.”
“I hope you know that I’ll never be able to come to terms with any of this,” Jasper said, now ruminating on his own precarious situation.
“Universal backend,” Rosalind said proudly, pointing the pen all around her. And then she pointed it at Jasper. “Sheltered professor.”
Jasper didn’t care to fight it this time. He returned to his meal. Rosalind took advantage of the pause and soaked in the living and breathing world around her, stashing away her creeping anxiety, if even for just a solitary moment. The mix of the familiar NPC faces that she’d oriented herself to over years of programming, and the real-life strangers who were immersing themselves in the experience that was the Alexandria Inn, was a very heartwarming scene for her. This was what she’d always hoped XPeriential Points would be.
As her eyes scanned the room, she noticed a small group having dinner in the corner of the hall. The members of the table returned her gaze, quite intensely actually, and then nonchalantly turned back to their dinner and scattered conversations. Huh.
The sudden sound of footsteps clambering up the stairs became more and more pronounced, like a train closing in at a destination. As the footsteps reached the summit of the stairs, they became a deafening crescendo, drowning out the clatter of utensils against dishes, drunkards cheering, and the choir of disparate conversations that filled the room.
Jasper's fork, laden with potatoes and suspended in mid-air "airplane" mode as his mouth hung open, had now frozen in place due to the surreal volume of the footsteps. The thought ‘how on earth could footsteps ever be this loud’ reverberated in his mind. Rosalind’s snapping fingers in front of his face brought his attention back to her. “Just a heads up,” she said, smiling with anticipation. “This is gonna be really cool.”
And with that, she, along with the entire dining hall, turned her attention to the archway, her chin resting affectionately on a fist supported by her elbow on the table. A presence entered the room, each step it took resonating in Jasper and Rosalind’s ears.