Hector stood in Lobby 7 to hear the ranting of a long-haired sophomore with a katana. "I will extinguish the power of dreams forever! Mwahaha!" The sophomore -- er, Dark Lord Bishnara -- flung an unimpressive smoke bomb at his feet and ran away, giggling. A more senior member of the MIT Assassins' Guild stepped forward, wearing a straw hat that hid his eyes. He ordered the bold heroes to gather the elemental crystals and defeat Bishnara before his evil plans could succeed and before the spring semester started.
"Is the Guild always like this?" Hector whispered to the junior beside him. So far, Hector had only played the Saturday night dart gun battles in Building 36.
His teammate patted him on the shoulder. "Yes, my noble steed!" Vincent was playing a paladin because he always played paladins in these things. As one of the guys in Hector's suite at Burton-Connor Dormitory, it was hard not to constantly hear from him about the Guild and its endless games.
"Remind me how that works."
Vincent hefted the remarkably realistic breastplate he wore, emblazoned with the sun icon of the non-specific holy god he served. "I have heavy armor, so I can only walk -- unless you're traveling with me. So let's get to questing!"
They picked up a Red Mage with a cool feathered hat, and a girl he recognized from 18.01 (Calculus I) last term. Together their party joined in a group brawl already starting in the Infinite Corridor. Shouts of "10 Ice damage!" and "Cure!" rang out. Students with foam swords and good-guy badges dueled the people playing minions of Bishnara. "Follow me!" said Vincent, and waded in with his own padded rattan lance.
Hector tried to keep up, to justify his friend's ability to run. He felt bewildered already with all the rules behind people hitting each other. The party's Red Mage flung a ping-pong ball at a monster-masked guy and shouted, "Slow!" to make him move in slow motion. Hector shook his head and watched, trying not to trip over anyone or get whacked by anyone's play weapons.
"Heal me!" said Vincent.
Hector saw his paladin dueling with a guy whose black name badge clearly proclaimed "DRAGON". "I can heal?"
"Yes, yes; just say it and tap me!"
Hector poked Vincent and called out, "Heal!"
Vincent had enough hit points now to leap forward and take the dragon down, enthusiastically enough to accidentally knock him to the floor. "Sorry!" he said, and helped the guy up.
The dragon laughed and dusted himself off. "You will never defeat my master! Raaar!" He dropped a scroll and fled into the basement, turning his name badge around to become dead for now.
Hector rolled his eyes. "Sorry. I missed something in my character sheet. I have levels in White Mage or something?"
"You're a [i]white[/i] Chocobo," said Vincent, which obviously explained everything.
The girl from 18.01 -- who had a Nerf crossbow and a badge saying "Engineer", grinned and peered at Hector's tag. "Oh, a Chocobo! Say it."
"Say what -- oh. 'Wark!'" He flapped his arms like the wings of the riding bird he was supposed to be.
"I'm Alice. Kupo!" She had a hairband with fuzzy ears and a bouncing red pom-pom, which made her a Moogle. Not just an animal in this setting, but still usually a mascot character rather than anything serious.
The Red Mage made sure the other students were dispersing, then pointed to the scroll. "I have skill points in Lore: Everything, so I can read this. One of the crystals is in the basement of Building 10."
Vincent crowded close. "It says that?"
"No, it says the Dungeon of Seething Organic Reaction, which obviously refers to under classroom 10-250 where they do Organic Chemistry. We don't need more clues."
Hector blinked a few times. "I still don't think I'm fully into the spirit of this thing."
"It's okay," said Alice. "First time, right? You've got a simple role with no subplots, probably. Just use that Choco Cure power and see if you can find the Meteor upgrade. Also you can peck people to death."
Hector shrugged. "Okay. Yeah."
They headed down the huge hallway that crossed half of the main campus, and ventured into the basement. A goblin ambushed them, but the Red Mage blasted him by shouting, "Fire!" (The Guild had an understanding with Campus Police about inappropriate shouting, midnight lightsaber duels and so on.) Soon, they stopped. Alice was holding them back with one arm.
"See there?" she said, and pointed to a tiny note on the wall, two feet from the ground.
Hector crouched to look. "This is Trap #10b-2. Strike to disable."
"Aw, heck," said Alice. "We missed the first one, so it went off. We take --"
"Six points of Earth damage from falling rocks," said the Red Mage, who'd just gone back and found the first note. "I know Cure, anyway."
He and Hector healed everyone up while Alice stood against the far wall and expertly tossed a beanbag to hit the "trap". "Got it. Hurry; we're on a time limit in trap corridors."
They went along spotting traps until they reached a secret door, a closet marked as such. Alice "searched" well enough that it only cost one minute to enter, so they didn't have to start over. "The game masters know we have the dragon's scroll, so they probably have somebody hiding nearby. Ready for a boss fight?" Everyone nodded, and she opened the closet...
It wasn't a closet. Hector stared into a classroom where rippling blue light shined from a spinning crystal. Somewhere a hidden music player had cued the crystal theme. Hector didn't know all the trivia of the "Final Fantasy" video games that this silly campus thing was based on, but even he instantly recognized the haunting, deceptively simple up-and-down scale of harp notes. He stood silently, imagining that he couldn't see the string that the crystal dangled from. It was just hovering, shining, because it was an artifact of power, not meant to be fully understood.
Alice whistled beside him. "Nice effect."
"I didn't know there were classrooms in the basement," said the Red Mage. "This would be room 10-080." He nodded to himself, glad to have classified it.
Vincent stepped into the room. Hector saw his friend's hand trembling, fingers outstretched, and his mouth slightly open. Hector thought he understood. There are times when even a ruthlessly skeptical man of science wants to see a world of miracles. All four of them had crowded through the door without noticing it, drawn by the light.
Vincent gingerly pulled the crystal out of its harness and held it up. The light rippled brighter, then faded, and the music gave a familiar fanfare.
"Where was that coming from?" said Alice. She searched the classroom for the music player.
The Red Mage looked around at old wooden desks and blank chalkboards. The place couldn't have been renovated in this century. "More relevant, where are our instructions? I don't see a note."
Vincent reluctantly took his gaze off of the crystal and handed it to Hector to put in his belt pouch. He slicked back his hair. "This is... yes. You're right. Nothing laying around about how this gives us a clue to the next crystal, or a combat bonus or something?" No one had found anything.
Alice gave a relieved laugh. "Oh, here. A hidden camera. The GMs know we were here, so they'll make sure the plot keeps going. And the last few minutes will probably make it into the wrapup video." She waved to the little lens wired to one wall.
Hector said, "Fun to see behind the curtain, I guess."
The Red Mage nodded and turned to Vincent. "Lead on, Paladin. Actually, let me see something." He went out to the hall and examined the room left of 10-080, then the one to the right. "I'm not sure how that room even fits in there! Look at the spacing."
Vincent shrugged. "I'd like to look at floor plans later. We've got a quest to finish, and we're becoming major characters already."
#
As strange as the basement room had been, Hector found he was having fun with the regular game mechanics. Fight an endless supply of goblins, dragons, and inexplicable magic robots; seek out reclusive sages who couldn't have been more than thirty years old in reality; shop for better equipment. Hector rolled his eyes as he watched Vincent and the others browsing an illustrated list of weapons as excitedly as if the things were real. "You know buying the Crystal Lance won't really upgrade your padded one, right?"
The Red Mage looked at Hector like he was crazy. "It's a [i]plus three[/i]. And it does Holy damage."
Alice swigged soda from a canteen with gears on it. "Where to?"
Vincent handed Hector back the notecard listing their current loot. He led them on toward the Glass Towers of Madness, which had to be the Gates Building. The joke on campus was that someday an earthquake would straighten out the jumbled walls. Hector couldn't help but let reality intrude into his thinking, when the party walked by on the street. Just last year, a terrorist had been in a deadly gunfight with campus police right about here. They were all quiet for a bit.
The massive building and the others it was welded to felt different. Hector had been through here before, but now there were monsters of a sort. And treasure. Alice found the entrance to another trap hallway and began disarming things. Just then, a troll leaped at them from behind, with a battle cry of "Sneak attack! Plus two damage!"
Vincent and the Red Mage drew their weapons and battled. Hector tried to slap them on the shoulder once in a while for healing. The troll had a lot of defense, from what Hector understood, so it was driving them back with that giant (padded) club. "Raar! Kill!"
They were fighting so hard in the hallway that the noise didn't register at first. Hector hopped backward and flailed his arms for balance, which made him glance to one side just in time. The ceiling was falling in! He yelped a warning and flattened himself against one wall, then shoved Alice out of the way. A panel and many pounds of metal pipes crashed down where they'd been standing, spraying cold water everywhere.
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The fight stopped instantly. The troll had his club raised and a shocked look on his green-painted face. "Oh, man. Is anyone hurt?"
The Red Mage held up his staff as if trying to mystically freeze the water before shaking his head. Alice looked the crashed pipes up and down while water pooled around her. "We might be able to reattach them."
"It's too dangerous," said Vincent. "Someone call the Physical Plant people."
"No, no, I see a valve. Just let me hop up on you, Hector."
"Me?" Alice was already reaching for him, though, so he reluctantly clasped his hands and helped boost her by the soles of her wet, dirty boots. She was pretty light. A few seconds of fumbling later, she turned a handle and the largest pipe stopped leaking.
"There; that should limit the damage." She hopped down from Hector's hands like a gymnast.
The ogre stared at the jagged edges of the pipes and the cracked tiles where they'd hit. The collapsed panel had landed right next to one of the hidden markers on the wall. "That was close. Look, that's enough traps for one mission. I'm going to run off to get a repairman. Go ahead to the crystal room. I'll tell the GMs afterward to set your party up for the final dungeon."
Hector looked past the damaged area to the big lecture hall. "That room, right?"
"According to my calculations," said the Red Mage, "the crystal should be under one of the chairs in an even-numbered row. We'll have five minutes to search or fail the quest."
Vincent started to regain his enthusiasm. He smacked a fist into his other palm and said, "Right! There's a world to save. And I want to get to Tosci's for a sundae before they close."
Alice walked toward the lecture hall's door and opened it. "Uh, guys..."
Hector tilted his head. "What?"
"Just look."
They all crowded around her and stared into a jungle ruin.
Either Hector had greatly underestimated the Guild's special effects, or they hadn't put this place here. The waterfall could be related to the broken pipes outside, but not the vines and trees stretching impossibly high into a misty ceiling. A green crystal hovered and spun above the cupped hands of a broken statue, which depicted a woman with cat ears and a tail.
Vincent stammered. Alice listened to the jungle's faint music and turned to them, saying, "How?!"
The Red Mage paced around the ruin, his glowing staff burning slightly through the mist. "More or less matches Viera architecture of the Ivalice period," he muttered. "And of course all the statues are female."
Hector tilted his head and looked the ruins over. The ground felt soft. It transitioned smoothly from the linoleum tiles outside to moss and dirt, with just a suggestion of grid lines. Someone had left bird tracks in the ground by the entrance.
Vincent approached the crystal and stared up at it. "Hector? How much are you playing along with this game?"
Hector stepped closer to the statue's hands to admire the shimmering green light. "It's more realistic than I'd expected." [i]Impossible![/i] he thought.
"Something is seriously wrong here," said Alice. Somehow she'd gotten up onto a high tree branch.
"Not [i]wrong[/i]," said Vincent. "Haven't you ever wanted to see something like this? A bit of magic in the world?"
Hector looked through the fog at the weathered rocks. Either someone had hauled in tons of masonry, or these were plaster replicas of higher quality than he'd ever seen before. The door back to normal reality showed up as a stone arch with electric light barely visible beyond it. "Yeah, but it's just a game." He scuffed one foot in the dirt, trying to sound nonchalant. He wanted to be someplace where his actions mattered, where he was a hero. Even a mission like "collect magic crystals" seemed less arbitrary than collecting student loans and course credits. The pull, the desire to believe what he was seeing, was intense enough that he even smelled moss and jungle flowers instead of sterile Institute air.
The Red Mage was lecturing to no one about conflicting interpretations of Ivalice culture as seen in various games, when he stopped in mid-word and noticed that his staff was glowing. "Obviously... obviously some impressive concealed lights." He looked nervously up to the invisible ceiling.
"Yeah!" said Hector, too loudly. "You know what? Let's go get that ice cream at Tosci's. Leave the questing until tomorrow when we're a little less rattled."
Vincent said, "You really can't believe your own eyes? Do you even see a string supporting the hovering crystal here? This is special! Somehow it's come here and I just wish --"
Hector's friend grabbed the emerald as he was talking, to hold it out toward the others, to show them that there was more than the Assassins' Guild behind what they were seeing. He never got to finish what he was saying, though. The wave of light that swept across the room made Hector feel as though he were being scoured all over with sandpaper. The noise of it was an angelic choir singing one note unbearably loud. Then, the light and noise were gone, and the four of them lay unconscious on the dirt.
#
Hector first noticed the shining lance on the floor, pointed toward his face. "Oh, right," he murmured, "you got the crystal one for plus three holy damage."
"Kupo," Alice complained. She pressed one hand to the ground and started to stand, then stared at it, drawing Hector's gaze to the same spot. Her hand was small and fuzzy, ending in claws, and the same white fur covered her bare arm and in fact, all over. A red pom-pom thing bounced above her head on its antenna. "What the hell? Are you seeing this?"
Hector struggled to stand up and felt like he was trying to climb over a pile of pillows. His hands didn't move right, and flopped around in odd ways.
His arms were white-feathered wings. He squawked -- the noise sounded like "Wark!" -- and noticed the curve of a black beak in the middle of his vision.
"Whoa, Hector! You look, uh, regal!" Vincent had a suit of bright plate armor (+2 defense against Shadow damage) with his non-specific sun god crest. Literally, now, and not just on his character sheet. He was grinning.
Hector took a moment to confirm that he was seeing what he thought he was. He couldn't feel his fingers, but could definitely feel wingfeathers against that hard shell-like thing where his nose and mouth should've been.
He had some trouble thinking for a minute or two after that, and at some point the Red Mage whacked him upside the head. "Quit panicking. [i]What[/i] has happened is obvious. We just don't know [i]why[/i], or [i]how[/i] I'm going to explain this to my officer in ROTC."
Vincent grinned wider. "Are you kidding? This is great! You probably even have a real spellbook now, one that's not made from an old copy of a Nintendo Power strategy guide."
The Red Mage's eyes widened and he fished through his stylish red robe (not much changed from the fancy one he'd already had) to find a gem-encrusted book. "I... think I need some time alone."
Alice steadied him before he could faint. "I'm a [i]moogle[/i], for God's sake! Magic mole-bat critter? Did anyone catch that, kupo?" She paused. "Damn it, I'm saying it already. And if we've just been hit with some kind of reality shift, then that noise over there is probably not special effects by the GMs. On guard!"
A lumbering beast the size of a horse stomped out from behind a ruined stone column. Armored plates covered its back and its mace-like tail.
"Ankylosaurus?" said the Red Mage.
Vincent picked up his lance. "Let's fight!"
Predictably, the sudden dinosaur charged at them. Vincent set his lance, but the creature dodged and only made the point slide along its tough hide. It whipped around and caught Vincent with its massive tail-club, slamming him to the ground despite his armor.
"Lightning!" shouted the Red Mage, dramatically holding his staff aloft. Nothing happened.
Alice found a sturdy-looking hammer on her toolbelt, and swung it mightily despite being fuzzy and cute. Her blow caught the dinosaur square in the leg and made it stagger. "No visible damage numbers? Aww." She hopped back out of range, making the little wings on her back flutter. "Get 'im, Vincent!"
Vincent struggled to stand. Hector tried to help him up, but found that his wings really weren't good for grabbing things. Instead, Vincent seized Hector's wing and pulled himself up with that, making Hector wince. Vincent said, "Sorry! Busy fighting dinosaurs!" and did a stabbing charge.
Hector hung back while his friend and Alice laid into the dinosaur and the Red Mage tried to figure out how to actually cast spells. He shook his beaky head at the madness. They were in danger, but he couldn't help feel that it was insignificant, equivalent to the dozen mock battles they'd already had.
Vincent grunted and skidded backwards, scraping sparks from his armor against stone. This time he'd gotten bashed in the head, hard enough to bleed. Hector gaped. This was the guy he'd seen doodling dragons in physics class, suddenly knocked out of the world of academics into actual trouble.
"I can't do this!" said the Red Mage, shaking his staff in frustration. "Heal him, Hector!"
"How?!"
"I don't know!" The Red Mage was suddenly busy trying to fight in melee against a multi-ton dinosaur.
Vincent lurched closer to where Vincent had landed and poked him with one wing, saying, "Uh, heal?" To his surprise, his feathers shined with warm, pure white light, and Vincent's wounds closed in seconds. The man sprang right up and returned to the fight as though nothing had happened, cheering himself on.
Hector stepped backward and looked at his wings again, tilting his head to stare with one eye and then the other. "I did that?"
The ankylosaurus roared and thudded to the ground, slain at last. Something metallic clattered against the "ancient" stones and rolled into the moss and vines.