After I dropped out of school I started doing a bunch of research into different gaming rigs and what devices and games were all the rage. I didn’t want to get something super expensive, but I couldn’t buy anything cheap either if I wanted to become a good gamer. I would be new to this so starting out I wanted to determine which kind of game I liked best and what I system to get it on.

In 2024 they have lots of different systems, but what everyone goes crazy for is FDVR games. I could start with those, but I’m not sure what kind of game I’d like to play yet. I would have to choose low costing games before I officially decided on anything in particular. I decided that due to my studious nature I’d like something I could explore a lot of that requires strategy. That would leave me with two choices. I could play first person shooters or I could end up playing a competitive online rpg. I would have experience with neither of them frankly, but I’m sure I could enjoy them.

A little over a month later I decided that I would buy a FDVR (Full Dive Virtual Reality) rig and some rpg games. I did want to get some experience in, but rpg games aren’t the type of game you get paid to play competitively. I did want to make money off of playing games, but for my first year I could just play games I enjoyed. I needed to get use to playing games before I decided on anything finally.

After researching the different gaming rigs I started searching for games. I did want to play competitive games, but I wanted to try out rpg games beforehand. RPGs came in many forms. You had games that were simple turn takers. Turn taking RPGs were fun, but not the type of game you’d play on FDVR rig. There were other games that were FPS games in which you leveled up and then there were the J-RPGs (Japanese Role Playing Games.) In J-RPGs the game was mostly plot oriented and battle systems varied. Some were turn takers others you had full control of your characters.

J-RPGs seemed to be mind kind of style, but I didn’t want to play games that had been out for awhile so I looked it up and the only game that would be coming out within the next two months came out in two days. It was called Evolution. Not much was released about the game other than a small video and a couple of facts about the game. Since the game was also made by an unknown company the game wasn’t going to be very popular.

The company Silphco hadn’t really made any games that were good so this next project was also expected to be a flop. Silphco had only been around a couple years and none of the games previously made had been any good which makes me wonder how they even stayed in business. Staying open for five years must’ve been hard unless they were developing some big product. Looking at the year to game ratio they only produced a game every fourteen months or so which is roughly a point eighty-five percent ratio.

Even so Evolution’s notoriety wasn’t really big so I wanted to start by playing it before I got into anything. I checked the promotional video. It was only thirty seconds so I decided to watch it quickly. The only thing shown was a character walking down a dark hallway lit with torches. A couple sentences appeared while this was happening and when he got to the end of the tunnel it was bright. The world looked pretty amazing and then it cut out. The video wasn’t anything special, but it did show the games art which I personally found to be fairly interesting.

I went down to chris to ask him if he would buy one. I lived in the upstairs of his bar. I didn’t live with him officially, but provided I stayed mostly quiet and didn’t interrupt his work I was allowed to stay up there. The attic of the bar originally was used for storage, but since a basement was made then the attic no longer had a purpose. My room didn’t look all that great. It had my bed perfectly made every day, a book shelf filled with books and my school stuff.

Although the attic was kind of messy I never had bugs in there because I cleaned up any messes I made and I never let food sit on the floor if I dropped it. I also frequently sprayed my room down with bug spray and freshly scented things like febreeze. My wooden floors were dark brown almost black, but they didn’t really creak because they were sturdy. The walls were a faded cream color. I never really needed a light until it grew dark outside because I had a huge round window in my room at the head of the bed.

I had a dresser, but I didn’t use it for clothes. I was too lazy to move my clothes from the clothes bin to the dresser. The distance between the side of my bed which the bin rested and the dresser was about twenty feet and while I could move the bin to the dresser and then pack all the assorted goods in it was far more convenient to have a change of clothes already next to my bed. Before I went to bed each night I would always put my change of clothes on top. If I had to take a shower I would just move the clothes into the shower prematurely and sit it on the top of the cabinet. I did everything I needed to get done prematurely. Except for cleaning. I hadn’t dusted my room in about four months because it was a hassle.

Any task I had to do could be done prematurely except for cleaning. Hell I could have even had the dishes prematurely done. All I would have to do is let it soak in some dawn filled dishwater about 4 hours, come back and do a small amount of scrubbing and they would be clean. My motto has always been to get the most amount of work done with the smallest amount of effort. For every chore or activity I had to do excluding cleaning I could do most of the job prematurely without most effort and I applied this to everything.

A great example of this was me being ahead in my classes. I had studied years ahead just so I could slack off in class. Of course you can’t really call what I did slacking because I never had lower than a A+ in any of my classes. I could pretty much sleep through class though and whenever they gave homework I got it done in a matter of minutes. While they had been learning how to do it, I had been sleeping since I already knew how to do it and I had even figured out short cuts for any equation that had one. Doing any form of work was a cinch for me which is why I didn’t really take school seriously in eighth grade and dropped out.

Gaming would be easy for me though because of how I am. I would take lots of time studying each individual game before I played it. If it had a strategy that worked commonly I would just use that. If the strategy had a flaw in it I would notice quickly and make adjustments. I don’t know for sure whether following that would bore me, however I first had to test it.

I walked down stairs into the bar and saw Chris cleaning out a glass mug. On the last step down the stairs I hit the creak. Only the first step creaked which was kind of an annoyance, but after awhile I had just gotten used to it. The creak alerted Chris I was there and he turned his head and looked over at me. Chris wasn’t smiling at first when he saw me, but as soon as he saw it was me he immediately cracked a smile at me.

Chris was a white half french, half american who had gone to culinary school to become a great chef. He however found that he loved one thing more than cooking and that was alcohol. He still cooked at the bar, but more than anything the bar was known for great booze.

Chris always seemed stressed about something, but he hid it well when he was around me. He had lingering concerns about something, although I didn’t know what troubled him. I had come here to ask him a question and even though he was smiling at me I felt bad for even asking him. Money around here was probably tight meaning he couldn’t really afford it.

I looked around the bar before I spoke to him since I had almost forgotten what it looked like. I had been up in my room for a long time after all. The bar had wooden floor made from oak. It had been freshly polished early this week and no remnants of food or alcohol were on the bar or floor. The bar was made from brown sandy colored ashwood. Behind it sat five rows of alcohol stretching all the way up to the ceiling organized by color not type which I found funny. Chris didn’t look professional because of this, but he thought that color coding the alcohol looked nicer than simple organizing them by category.

The bar stretched around to the right and seperated into the kitchen on the left behind two push doors and the bathrooms which were straight down the hallway. Unlike many bars and fast food places that have disgusting bathrooms Chris made sure that the bathroom looked nice by cleaning it periodically three times a day.

The bathroom had three stalls and three urinals placed parallel to each other. There were two white sinks over top of the checkered red and white tiled floors. The walls in there had been painted red instead of the typical white color. In the last stall which was rarely used there had been a faded mark on the wall from the countless times chris had hit it with his fist. If he ever got angry he came into that stall and punched the wall once. After that he would leave and go back to the kitchen. I don’t know why he got pissed off, but once he did he would go in there and punch it. Considering it was made of concrete I’m surprised he never broke his hand.

The kitchen had white and black tiles also in a checkered pattern. It was cluttered but clean. Every tool that had been used was cleaned immediately after use although it wasn’t always put up where it belonged. That didn’t matter however as the table tops were also cleaned after every use. Chris went through a lot of cleaning supplies, but he made up for that with good high priced food and good booze.

After remembering the layout of the bar I took one last look at the main part of the bar. We didn’t use tables here we only used booths and the seats up next to the bar which stretched all the way around the bar. We had thirty total booths in total organized in a maze like pattern. All the booths looked the same except of the corner ones which were rounded around the table. The seats were all black leather, with buttons that had been sown in for decorative design. The walls around the bar were made from polished oak and had pictures of different times in the bar. My favorite though was a picture of me and Chris sitting on a bench across the street with the bar in the background. It read Chris’s Cantina on the sign in big neon yellow lettering.

Chris would probably say no to the Horizon rig because it costed three-thousand. Even so ready to face rejection I walked to the bar with my head held high and asked him “Hey, Boss, I’m sure we probably don’t have money for it, but could you get this for me?” I showed him an image on my phone which showed a standardized picture of a FDVR console which was called Horizon.

Horizon was the name of a rig that was standard for gamers. It was a FDVR console. It consisted of one white helmet two orange colored gloves and a handful of sensors meant to be put on the body. Horizon had little risk compared to other FDVR consoles and it was also made to be form-fitting. Horizon had come out a year ago, but it was still frequently used even after the newer models came out because of how easy it was to use. The cost had dropped from three-thousand and five-hundred to just three-thousand. This was because the supply was lower than the demand so getting one could take a few weeks even if you preordered. That was when it originally came out though. Since it had been out for a year the demand had gone down so getting one wouldn’t take very long.

For those of you who don’t know what makes Full Dive VR so interesting I’ll explain. FDVR is a type of gaming rig which allows you to actually play inside of games. VR is just a head set of sorts like a visor that affects how you perceive reality, but FDVR allows you to fully go into a game. You can look how you want and although your muscles are immobilized during gameplay to prevent you from hurting yourself, the device can read the brain patterns, and it understands what kind of action you want to do just by reading them. It can also differentiate between thoughts and speaking so you don’t have to worry about letting something slip. That also makes chatting with others really convenient since you don’t have to pull up a chatting menu.

It is a revolutionary way to game because playing a character can be interesting, but actually being the character is something different. If you were to play a horror game you could actually feel the fear the character did. It wouldn’t just be data. In fighting games you no longer had to worry about slipping up and missing a quarter circle in a combo. In shooting games you had full control of your screen so you didn’t have to worry when sniping that you couldn’t see the outlines around the scope. It improved gameplay in so many ways.

There were sensors on the body that could be turned on or off that let you even feel things from the game. If you wanted to know what being shot felt like turn on an FPS game and keep the sensors on. Once you got shot you could feel the gunshot even though there was no mark. Of course not everyone liked that so most turned off the sensory aspect of it. I had done extensive research into the horizon and decided that it was the best.

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Most models had functions that didn’t get used often. Some had wiring bugs. One version of FDVR almost got all models shut down because users got stuck in the games and weren’t capable of leaving the game. Luckily this could be stopped by simply turning off the console, but some people lived alone which was dangerous. However all of those versions had been recalled and Horizon was created and tested many times before production. Horizon not only had no reported failures, but it wasn’t super expensive when comparing it to the other models. It had a moderate state of the art running system so it didn’t run super fast, but it was by no means slow. Perfect for me I suppose since I was just getting into gaming.

The thing that had sold me on it though was not its cost or the fact that it had no known issues, but the design on it. Normally you need lots of body trackers, but that’s not the case on this one. You have a visor kind of like a biker helmet over top of your head. Then you have one sensor where your heart is and a set of gloves. The rest of the sensors are just on the side of your legs. None of them leave pressure marks from being on skin so that nobody comes out looking like they came out of a test tube.

Once I had pointed to the phone Chris looked at the price and winced and then smiled at me. He said that’s a pretty hefty sum for a regular gaming rig. The price on the rig had been around three thousand. Almost as much as a used car, but for the quality of the device and everything else that came with it three thousand really wasn’t that much. Chris said “Asher this is pretty expensive. I’m sure you know that, but I have to ask how much do you want this? If I get it for you are going to actually use it and lastly is there any warranties on it?”

I said “I want it a lot. I was thinking about starting a gaming career. I will use it a lot and lastly yes part of the cost is a five year warranty. As far as I’m concerned it is the best model given prices and everything that it comes with.”

“What does it come with?” Chris asks me.

“I get to choose one game with purchase the device comes with all of the sensors I will need and it also comes with a second set of sensors so if I bust mine or you want to play there is an extra.”

“Is that really worth it?” Chris questions..

“Yeah it is.” I tell him.

“If you agree to clean your room once every week and help me down in the bar when I need it as well as do what I ask of you I’ll consider it a fair trade off. Can you do that?” He asks me.

“That’s a cheap price to pay for the Horizon, so that’s a definite yes” I tell him cooly.

“I assume you have a game in mind when we go out to buy it?” He inquires.

I had actually found a game that I wanted. I haven’t said as much, but I spent about a month studying the gaming rigs and another full month on games. Two days from now there would be a new game coming out. All that was released about the game was its title and a small trailer. Because of how much the game was left in mystery I only know a few things about it. It is definitely a rpg style game. It will definitely be online and lastly It is going to require lots of strategy which is something I’m great at.

The problems with the trailer were first that a new gaming company created them one that has been out for years, but was about to be shut down for not releasing any big titles. It released a shitty FPS game that only a couple million played. They never updated it so after a couple of months the popularity died. Then they released The-worst rpg-to-ever-be-created. I am not sure what made it so bad, but many people hated it. It was supposedly worse than the original ET game which is hard to believe considering all of the copies of that game have their own graveyard.

The game I had in mind was called Evolution. Not much was said about the game and since the game was produced by an unknown company it probably wouldn’t be really popular. No more than a thousand copies of the game would probably be bought considering the company not only hasn’t been very successful, but they also didn’t say much about the game. I can’t explain why I chose this game because frankly any normal person would have said no immediately, but not me. This game drew me in and since it was so much of a mystery I couldn’t hold back my curiosity.

I say to Chris “Yeah Boss there’s this game called Evolution that comes out in two days. It isn’t really popular, but it drew me in.”

Chris says “Glad you’ve found something that you like. Tomorrow clean your room and help me down stairs and we’ll buy the Horizon rig you want along with that game you want.”

“Thanks” I exclaim.

I run back upstairs and start doing extensive research on Rpg games. I want to see if any news has been found out about Evolution. I check the site for the game and the only news that has been listed on the game is that it will be multiplayer online and it takes up a lot of data. The game supposedly takes up two terabytes of data. That means the game is huge. Other than that nothing has been released about the game.

I look several different times refreshing the page and checking different URLs, but no matter where I check I can’t seem to find out anything about the game. The only thing I have to go off is the video. I decide to rewatch it.

It starts with a character in silver armour walking down a dark hallway. The hallway is made entirely out of stone. There are bars to the characters left and right. This makes me think the character is in a prison of some sort. He continues walking forward shuffling until he gets outside. He then falls to his knees underneath the sunlight and the rest of the vast world is shown.

During the time he is walking in the hallway a sentence is being shown through carved letters on the wall to his right How will you play? In this ever changing world how will you adapt? Will you rise to the occasion or be swallowed by the darkness? After this it just showed the release date which was two days from now the twenty-fifth of april twenty twenty-four.

I figured I should probably get accustomed to rpg games before I played this one. Of course I couldn’t actually get ready by playing them so i watched videos of people playing them and with a notepad took careful study of what happened. I would watch and make mental notes of their mistakes as well as what they did well at. I started by watching people play Dark Souls. It was an older game, but it held a lot of challenge and was a well liked game.

When playing dark souls the objective in order to get the advantage over those stronger than you was to get behind them and perform a backstab for criticals. If fighting something weaker just wait for the opponent to reveal which attack pattern it was going to go into and then roll past them to finish them quickly. The same could be applied to every enemy and boss in the game. I noticed that there were chests you could obtain loot from, but every so often there was a enemy pretending to be a chest called a mimic. There were subtle differences between the original chests and mimic chests. From mimic chests there were chains that fell out of the chest.

I watched how people would avoid attacks.I watched how they handled battle. If they didn’t have the right weapon for battle it didn’t take long to switch. You could have three weapon per hand ready to go. If one weapon didn’t work then they could simply switch. Magic was mostly broken if used right. I myself though was a melee kind of guy. I continued looking at different games to see how RPG games played even though I already had an basic concept. I did this all night until I finally grew tired and fell asleep on my bed.

The next day as soon as I awoke at noon I started dusting my room. It took me around a half hour or so to dust considering my room was about forty feet in total length and twenty feet wide. The bar below was closer to a hundred feet and sixty feet wide. Not huge, but compared to my room it was pretty large. After that I walked down the old oak stairs hitting that creak on the bottom and walked into the kitchen to find Chris making breakfast.

Once I opened the kitchen door I was assaulted by the aroma of bacon. Chris was making a bacon and cheese filled omelette for me. He said to me “Wait over in booth seats next to the bar and we’ll talk about your work for today.”

I nodded my head and said “Understood, Boss.” I walked over and sat in the seat next to the bar awaiting Chris with the plate of savory food. A minute later Chris came into the bar and put the plate down on the table. He went back into the kitchen to grab a fork and knife. He came back out with my eating utensils and orange juice in a mug. He set both of these down on the right side of my plate.

I cut the omelette and started to dig in. The omelette was amazing. Normally I hate the texture of eggs, but he had made them a little bit crispy the way I like them and the bacon since it had been precooked not only absorbed into the eggs flavor, but came from the inside as well. The cheese had been thrown in at the last second to avoid it coming out entirely melted, and retained its original texture. He had only used shredded cheese so it partially melted, but not enough to make it disgusting.

While I continued eating Chris leaned onto the counter with his back and looked back at me. He said “Today I’m going to have you clean the bar. You don’t have to serve food or anything like that, just make sure the bar doesn’t look like a mess. You should be fine since you aren’t the only one cleaning.”

I finished chewing and swallowed. I said “Sounds fine with me Boss.”

He said, “I’m sure were going to get that customer tonight so keep your head down and make sure not to get involved because I don’t want to have to kick a regular out even if he is an asshole.”

I nod my head and scarf down the rest of my omelette and then chug my orange juice. I start heading upstairs to go back to my room and I hear Chris call up “Asher get your room dusted and be back down here in an hour.”

I had already cleaned my room up, but I didn’t want to back talk him since I was getting the Horizon today so I just say “You got it Boss.” I trudge up the rest of the stairs and then hop on my computer. I close my door and turn on my favorite punk band Royal Blood. They have been out for about eight years now. They came out in twenty sixteen and had many great songs. My favorite being Don’t Tell. I start with their first album and let it auto play as I surf the web for any new info about Evolution.

The different forums about it are going wild. I had just gotten onto the page and already five people had made new messaging. At first I wondered if they had released anything about the game, but it was the exact opposite. The had removed all forms of data about that game from the site which people thought meant they were going to update the page. The only thing that remained on the page was a timer which had one day three hours and fifty-two minutes remaining. That meant that at four o’clock tomorrow they would be releasing something about the game. However the game also came out tomorrow at the time so maybe it would be a walk through or something.

People started going crazy about it and trying to understand what it meant. They were couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I didn’t really care too much about the forums, but if it would give me details about the game I would log in here periodically. I logged off after finishing the second album of Royal Blood and walked down stairs to help out Chris.

I didn’t even need to be told what he wanted me to start with. The bathroom needed to be done first. I grabbed some bleach and a rag and headed into the bathroom. After I finished the bathroom, I started sweeping the main floor area, and then I cleaned the kitchen. After this I took a break and went up into my room again. I kept checking the site no new updates and we still have full day to wait. I did this every three hours. I would clean come up here check and then go back down to clean again.

Around seven the customer Chris was talking about came in. He was a portly fellow and had a temper. He always wanted to be served first and every time he spoke spittle came out of his mouth. If he had to wait any longer than ten minutes for his food he got pissy and started yelling. Chris had always dealt with him by getting his food ready for the gentleman two minutes before he came in that way in five minutes he could get it out early and simply ignore him. After he finished he would send one of our waitresses over to collect the man’s bill and he would leave.

Tonight though something entirely different happened. The customer was dressed in a suit and seemed a little more aggravated today. Chris had his food out three minutes after he walked in. The man lit up a smoke which was against the bar policy. He had only done this once before which was the first time he came in and seemed to forget that policy because pulled out a cigar and started smoking. Chris walked over to him the second he started and said calmly “Sir put the cigar out. You know we have a no smoking policy here.” The customer said grabbed the cigar and dropped it on the floor and rubbed put it out by rubbing his foot on the floor.

I already knew Chris was pissed about this because he immediately headed to the bathroom. That meant one thing; Chris was about to go punch the wall and come back out. Once he returned from bathroom I saw his hand was bleeding. He wrapped it up wit some gauze and washed his hands. He looked over at Cindy and said “Go clean up the cigar and take it out back.”

Cindy was a blonde girl probably around twenty. She had a fairly curvy body and a pretty face. She was waitress material if I had ever seen it. Cindy got paid a lot more than any of the other waitresses not just because of the killer tips, but also because she had worked here for three years and kept this business running. Cindy looked kind of meager, but she was pretty confident about anything she did and although she got harassed a lot she never did anything about it because she didn’t want Chris to look bad.

Cindy calmly walked over bent down and picked up the cigar. She swept the ashes onto a dustpan and started to walk away. As she did the customer grabbed her ass and that was it for Chris. Chris walked over to the customer and grabbed the plate of food he had placed there a minute ago walked away dumped it in the trash and put it on the counter. He then walked back to the customer and said “Get the hell out of my bar. I had better never see you in here again.”

The portly customer stood up and said ‘Yeah, what are you gonna do about it?”

Chris said “I’m the owner of my establishment. You can either get the hell out of my bar or you can be dragged out of my bar. Your choice.”

The portly man dusted off his suit and said “Her ass did feel nice” Chris grabs him by the shoulders and slams his forehead into the other man's skull. The portly fellow falls over and lands on the table breaking it and Chris grabs him by the suit with one arm and drags him out of the bar. When he reaches the door Chris throws him out into the rain and slams the door shut.

Cindy approaches him and says “Chris, I’m sorry.”

He smiles at her and says “What for? That man was a jackass he needed to be put in his place.”

He walks back into the kitchen and starts working on the next dish. He looks at me and says “Take the table out and throw it in the dumpster out back. Unscrew the rest of it and I’ll have a new one put in tomorrow. Cindy help him with that please.”

We both look at Chris and say “Understood, Boss.”

It takes five minutes to get the table out, but after that I am exhausted. I tell Chris “I’m heading up to my room” and I take off my apron.

Chris nods and says “Good work today, Asher.” I’ll order the rig later tonight champ get some rest okay?”

I say “Understood Boss” and he chuckles.

The game comes out tomorrow so I hope the rig gets here shortly. The game comes with it as well so if Chris orders it quickly it should get here by tomorrow maybe late day. I jump in bed and start searching on my phone to see if anything changed. Once again nothing has changed. I turn my phone off and get up to go turn my lights off. Once I do that I crawl back in bed and go to sleep.