-Muted Infinity-
-A Cruel World: Ch 2-
“RHAAAA!” Lucy let out a warcry as she leapt to the side of a boar’s charge and swung her primitive stone sword down and into the beast’s path, using the hog’s own momentum against it to cut deep.
The boar squealed in a mixture of pain and rage as its HP bar dropped to zero and it crumpled to the ground, leaving Lucy panting for breath over her fourth kill of the day.
The boars were near spawn for a reason, they were “newbie trainers”. They had large tusks, and could deal decent damage on hit, but their charging attacks were very obviously choreographed and easy to predict.
Or as Rue had put it- “If you’re good, they’re easy. If you’re bad, you’re dead.”
Lucy was ripped from her thought though, as something slammed into her from behind and threw her to the ground.
Let it be said, Lucy never claimed to be a “good” player.
Quickly rolling out of the way of a hoof that would have stomped her head in, the blond managed to turn around to face the new boar that had gotten the drop on her. Offended that she was still alive, the boar lunged forward again, trying to impale her. Acting on instinct, Lucy brought her sword up and locked it with the animal's tusks.
Unfortunately, this put her in a direct brute force contest, with something much physically stronger than her.
“AHHHH! HELP!” Lucy screamed as she was shaken back and forth, barely managing to keep hold of her sword, as the boar tried its damnedest to dislodge the offending stick.
One particularly brutal yank made her lose grip with one of her hands, and threatened to make her loose the sword all together. Acting on a combination of instinct and adrenaline, Lucy used her now free hand to pull her primitive axe out of her inventory, and slam it down into the boar's head.
The thing squealed in pain, but the dull axe mainly just bounced off, barely denting its HP.
So she reared her arm back and slammed it down again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually the second rate “blade” managed to break past the boar’s thick skull, and hit something important, causing the monster to slump down dead on top of her.
Lucy weakly let the axe slip from her fingers and fall to the ground, panting heavily as the adrenaline rush subsided.
The two icons on the top left of her field of view mocked her, her health and stamina bars were halfway gone, but her new “party member’s” health was still completely full.
“Come on Lu!” Rue laughed as she slid off the falling body of her own boar, twirling a set of genuinely sharp stone daggers that she’d gotten from God knows where. “That’s only your fifth? I’m on number ten, try to keep up!”
The red gem skipped over and nudged the boar with her foot, skipping the more efficient method of pulling it apart manually, in favor of just having her inventory absorb it into general purpose material.
“It’s just like I said, three steps. Get their attention, sidestep, swing. Easy as cake! I’ve already got a feat from killing so many.”
“Yeah.” Lucy rubbed her back, and her wounded pride, as Rue pulled her to her feet. “Easy as cake.”
The two of them had spent quite a while trailing the pack of boar, attacking any small groups that strayed too far from the herd. The sun had shifted from its position at the height of the sky, to a beautiful golden sunset that reflected off the snow peaked mountains in the distance.
“Hmm, it’s getting pretty late.” Rubie yawned and cracked her neck. “We should probably get back to spawn before it gets dark. We can trade for better supplies there, assuming it’s not been turned into a warzone yet, at least. We don’t want to get caught out in the open when the nasty nocturnal stuff starts coming out.” She paused for a moment. “Actually… we might be far enough from spawn to run into some actual enemies, and we don’t exactly have the gear to fight those.”
Lucy nodded wordlessly, happy to call it there. They’d followed the boars several miles up the stream where it’d turned into a large river, and Lucy had learned the very unfortunate way that the devs of this game were sadists who had found a way to code in being sore.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry anything? I mean, I know it’s just in your inventory but the clutter’s got to be annoying, and you said more weight slows your movement speed...”
“Nah.” Rue waved her off. “I was the one whose muscle memory used a portion of the leather on a backpack, to expand a weight capacity we’re not even close to filling up. I should be the one to lug it all back, and besides-”
“RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”
They were interrupted by what could only be described as a “power up” scream that echoed from the distance.
“What was that?”
“No idea! But it came from just over that hill.” Rue grabbed Lucy’s hand with an excited smile, and began pulling her forwards. “Let’s go check it out!”
“Wait! What if it’s a monster!”
“Oh don’t be a worry wart, we’re just gonna take a peak.”
Lucy wanted to object, she really did, but before she could muster the words, she’d already been dragged up the side of the hill.
The sight that greeted them, however, wasn’t the evil monster she was expecting.
A man with the username [McDaddyDouglasTheArthur] was standing atop a small mound of black rocks, shovel raised to the sky, with what could only be described as a poorly made bastardization of a water mill, spinning very slowly behind him in the small river that sat at the bottom of the hill.
“I HAVE HARNESSED THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY!” The man bellowed to the heavens themselves. “SHEER UNLIMITED POWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
…
..
.
“...Huh.” Rubie tilted her head, seemingly as at a loss for words as Lucy. “Well this should be interesting.” And that was all the warning Lucy got, before she was being dragged along again.
[McDaddyDouglasTheArthur], or just Douglas or Arthur, because there was no way in Heaven that Lucy would ever say that full name, was an eye-catching figure. Even if you put aside the whole “standing atop of a pile of rocks while waving a shovel around and screaming at the top of his lungs”, he was tall, easily hitting six feet, had a sharp jaw, smooth black hair, and a piercing glare.
His partner had clearly chosen to be a Dwarf, because while was lacking a beard, she was barely four foot. She was standing off to the side of the large mound of rocks, had long brown twintails that reached to the back of her knees, and short bangs that cupped her rather cutesy face. But while she didn’t look insane on the surface…
If Douglas’ shouting had made him seem a little… odd, then just the username of his companion was a clear beacon of psychopathic tendencies.
[lIllIIII]
It was the name “Lilli3” in a string of capital “I”s and lower case “L”s, in that stupid font where they look exactly the same, and with a roman numeral 3 at the end to boot. The machinations of a mind capable of such evil weren’t just something that couldn’t be understood, they were something that shouldn’t be understood.
Lucy would have approached this pair of peculiar persons in a, err, cautious way- actually no, scratch that, she wouldn’t have approached them at all! But if she did, it would be with a long stick, and very slowly.
Unfortunately, Rue didn’t seem to have the same basic survival instincts.
“Hey!” She cheered as she skipped down the hill, Lucy in tow.
Both of the player’s heads whipped around towards them.
“Savages!” Douglas whispered, in a still very audible voice. “From the backward lands of the beyond! Halt travelers!” He shouted, raising his shovel at them. “State your business, or face the wrath of the most technologically advanced nation on this earth!”
Rubie just raised one eyebrow at him.
“Or what, are you gonna beat me with a shovel?
“Do not insult my shovel! It’s sturdy and blunt, and it’ll hurt more than the sharpest sword!” He paused for a moment, and Rubie’s eyebrow rose further. “N-Not- Not combat wise, but pain wise! Death via many consecutive doses of blunt force trauma, to the skull, is a terrible fate.”
He stabbed his shovel down into the black rocks he was standing on and grinned.
“Which is what you’ll have to taste, if you try to take our stuff!”
“Nah, no thieving from me today.” Rubie just chuckled and carefreely strode forward, pulling Lucy behind her. “I’m bust showing newbie-Lu’ here the ropes.”
“Oh, well, I guess nevermind. In that case welcome to, uh, wait,” He turned to his companion, “What do we name this place? It’s gonna be the industrial center of the world, but we still want to be a little humble.”
“I dunno,” Lillie shrugged, “Naming’s your thing, dude. I’d just call it ‘town’ and you’d get mad at me.”
“Crap, you’re right. Uh, quick, what’s German for Industrial Heartland?”
“No clue, but ‘Berg’ means walled city.”
“That doesn’t work! We don’t have a wall, idiot!” Douglas whisper shouted at her, waving his hand at the very open area surrounding them, before turning back to Lucy and Rubie with a commercial smile.
“Welcome, weary travelers, to the city of steel!” He spread his arms wide. “NEU ROMA!”
The grand city of “New Rome” truly deserved it’s title, one to rival and even outdo it’s predecessor, the single most important city in all of western history, if not world history, that changed the fate of the world on a level seldom comprehended.
The city of steel, the city of NeuRoma, had a single dingy wooden shack as it’s centerpiece, with two rose bushes haphazardly planted to either side of the door in such a way that you couldn’t actually fully open it, and trying to force your way through would most likely just prick you.
To the right, several large cobblestone furnaces billowed with an obscenely unnecessary amount of smoke, from all the leaves and foliage that had been shoved into them.
And then there was the city’s pride and joy, the monolith that would drive forth humanity into a new era of technological progress.
The watermill.
The giant safety hazard that was being held together by nothing but a bunch of crappy stone “nails”, string, several dead childhood dreams, the grace of God himself, and the sheer fucking audacity of the man who made it.
“Yes sir, the big guilds are gonna try to get into some funky bullshit magic, just like they did last time, but the technology train’s already fiiired uuup and ready to rumble!” Douglas took a very amateur boxing stance and threw some air punches. “And when the fists of steel start flying, oh baybee! They Don’t! Stop! COMIN’!”
He punctuated each word with a punch, but while they were in very poor form, and probably couldn’t even win against someone already dead, his energy was infectious, and Lucy found herself giggling like she was a kid again.
This, of course, caught the industrialist’s attention, and he gave a politician’s camera smile.
“It seems I’ve got your interest! Well then little lady, step right up to Le de’she-lu-flieur’s El Tour de NeuRoma! Where we build tomorrow today, and make today tomorrow!”
“That… That’s not French.” Rue pinched her nose, and closed her eyes as if she’d just developed a migraine from the words she heard. “That’s just gibberish, and the one English word you stuck in there as a fill-in means something completely different in French.”
Douglas just twirled his shovel like it was a cane, and promptly ignored her.
He walked over to the primitive smoke stacks to their right where, using his shovel, he grabbed a glowing hot hunk out of the furnace, and walked over to the watermill. The mill had two thick stone wheels stacked on top of one another, the wheel’s rotation turned the top one, which in turn moved the bottom one.
To the curiosity, and concern, of his onlookers, Douglas slowly began feeding the large lump of semi-molten metal slag into the two wheels.
“No one has the stuff for proper forging, no one will for a while. And actual good forging is a long way off. But with a healthy dose of ingenuity-”
Once the metal was caught in place, Douglas quickly swung to the other side, and began easing out the flattened plate with his trusty tool of choice. Gently he balanced the metal and kept it from sagging as best anyone could with a shovel, and once the last of it had been spat out by the roller, he slowly dunked it into the river water, cooling it back to solid.
After a few seconds he lifted his slightly bent creation proudly, for all to see.
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“-I have successfully made low quality sheet metal, ages before I was supposed to.”
Lillie gave a round of applause from off to the side.
“Uhhh.” Lucy just smiled awkwardly and gave a weak thumbs up. “Good job?”
Douglas let out a sigh that sounded like it shaved two years off his life.
“Little lady, I don’t think you get what’s happening here.” He held up his sheet of metal. “This is the key to the future! I can cut this into pieces, heat it up to bend it, and then use it for anything. Better furnaces, better forges, better crafting stations, I could upgrade the watermill, and that’s just the beginning! I can use this stuff to make the first iron gear of the server, the merchant with the only tools and armor of its tier! I’ll have a monopoly on metal-”
“Which will let you jack up the prices, and use the cash to get even further ahead.” Rue finished for him, actually sounding impressed.
“Bingo.” He shot a finger gun at her before turning back to Lucy. “So as you can clearly see, I’m not just a step ahead, I’m on an entirely different timeline.” Douglas laughed and spread out his arms. “LiT is all about arms races, and baby, I’ve just lapped everyone before they’ve even gotten to the starting line.”
“Waitwaitwait!” Lucy held up her hands and stepped between them. “If this will let you get so far ahead, then why are you showing us it?”
“Well, because you,” He gestured to her, “are a half bit newbie, and the red ghost behind you, I happen to recognise from the original LiT.” He glared over her shoulder and narrowed his eyes, to which Rubie waved back cheerfully. “Her, and her lot, are a lot of things, but they sure as Hell aren't engineers, they ain’t gonna be replicating my mill anytime soon. They’re also not dumb enough to attack a group that’s way better equipped than them, which I’ll be by the time she leads them back here to me.”
“Her and her lot? Wha-” But Lucy’s question was cut off as Rubie stepped around her and cut her off.
“I don’t suppose you’d be open to trade before you’ve officially opened up shop, aye big guy?”
“Ha! Not for my metal, the first few batches of this are going straight back into the furnaces to upgrade ‘em, and even if they weren’t, certainly not to you! But I would be willing to pawn off some of the extra charcoal we’ve made.” His eyes narrowed. “Also, don’t call me that.”
“No problem, ‘McDaddy’!” Rue crooned and mentally patted herself on the back, as Douglas growled, successfully drawing his attention away from Lucy’s half question. “I’ve got a bunch of boar hide leather, some bones, tusks, and a bunch of meat. You need any?”
Douglas thought for a moment before looking over at Lillie, who just shrugged. “I’d be willing to trade at a rate of two parts leather for one part coal, coal parts scaling with how big the leather piece is, with a discount of up to a 1-1 rate for bulk purchases.”
“That’s a surprisingly not totally one sided exchange. What, not in the mood for haggling me for a better price?”
“Normally I’d be draining your pockets, but not right now,” Douglas chuckled, “Not when there’s progress™ to be made!”
“Hmm.” Rue glanced over her inventory for a moment. “How’s five leather for one bucket of coal?”
“No.” He sighed. “There’s a reason I was trying to math it out in ‘pieces’, there’s a thousand loopholes to your offer on both sides. You could trade tiny leather strips, and then pull out a giant bucket- it’s not consistent!”
“Oh, but what do you think about this?” Rue materialized five leather rolls from her inventory, and unfurled one, revealing it to easily be large enough to cover a small desk.
Douglas leaned forward, squinting at the leather, once he could tell the ones under her arm were all the same size as the first he made an impressed sound. “Geeze, forget scamming, you're practically doing my price gouging for me. I’ll take that deal if you use the wooden bucket over to the left!”
“Pleasure doing business!” Rubie spun and hurled the leather rugs at Douglas, who instead of trying to catch them, just slapped them with his palm, dematerializing them into his inventory.
While Rue swept over to grab the modestly sized bucket, Douglas re-materialized the leather from his inventory in one large stack and threw it at Lillie, knocking her over with a yelp.
“Make a couple of bellows out of that, and put them on the smelters!” He laughed as he went back to shoveling charcoal into the furnaces. “Business is about to be booming!”
Lucy couldn’t help but chuckle at the scene before her, it was so much more real than what was in the majority of her single player games, which made sense considering it was between actual people. The idea behind the MMO genre was starting to grow on her.
Speaking of growing on her, a heavy sense of dread dropped into her stomach and swallowed her whole when she registered the little clock in the corner of her menu.
“Holy crap, it’s HOW late!? I’m going to miss the meeting!”
Quickly flicking away her menu, she jogged over to her companion.
“Hey Rue! Can we talk for a sec?”
“Rue?” Rubie turned around with her signature smirk and raised eyebrow. “You know the more I hear it the more I like it. ‘Ru and Lu’ we sound like some stupid school girls who just HAD to be friends because they wore matching dresses.” Rue chuckled maniacally and struck a sarcastically cute pose. “Wanna be BGFFTAs? Best Girly Friends Forever Totally Always?”
“Sh-Shut up!” Lucy blushed, and looked away. “I have a meeting I have to attend in an hour, and I need to get going, so could we split the loot now? A-And, well, yeah,” She blushed harder, infuriatingly embarrassed at how awkward Rue had made the subject, “I was gonna ask if you wanted to add me as a friend.”
The girl gave her a flat look, studying her for almost half a minute, before smiling again.
“Nop*e!~”
Rubie popped the ‘p’ and booped Lucy on the nose.
“Wha-” Lucy leaned back with wide eyes. “You don’t want to be my friend?”
“Oh, you’re so cute! Like a little puppy! If that offer still stands after this, then I’ll gladly take it, but you’re not getting the stuff you let me carry. You can keep the scraps you picked up though, I’m not heartless~”
Lucy just stared at her with an open mouth, causing the red gem to laugh like a devil.
“This is an Open World Survival Full Dive Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game, with the ‘massively multiplayer’ bit underlined. There are thousands of players online at any time, and very few of them are willing to always play fair. Sooo… Rule 0 of LiT!” Rue smirked and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t give strangers trust they haven't earned!”
Lucy gawked at the red head, her brain trying to work out a suitable response.
“Ohhhohoho! That’s cold!” Douglas reminded everyone he was there, as he leaned on his shovel and turned to Lucy with an open grin. “Are you just gonna take that?”
“W-What do you mean!?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” He scoffed and nodded at the sword on her waist. “You have a weapon, beat her up and take you shit back! Or better yet, since she kept, what, two thirds of the loot it sounds like? You take two thirds of the loot instead of all of it! Just to rub. it. in.”
Lucy looked from Douglass to Rue, who just raised an eyebrow, and slowly stepped back, her signature smirk never leaving her face.
“What are you waiting for Lu’? You look like a lost puppy!” Her crimson eyes twinkled in the amber glow of the setting sun as she spread out her arms. “I’m wide open, and I took a lot more than two thirds.”
Lucy gulped as Rue’s name disappeared from her hud, and a notification popped up saying she had left the party. Slowly she unhooked her sword from her belt, and brought it to bear with hesitation.
“Get her!” Lillie cheered, having come back with two bellows and more than happy to cheer for violence, despite not having a single clue what was going on. “Break her legs!”
Douglas leaned forward in anticipation.
Rue raised her other eyebrow to join the first.
Lucy’s eyes flickered from Rubie’s empty hands, to the bag on her back she was using to expand her inventory, to the daggers on her waist, to her tensionless upper body, to the perfect footwork that was strung so tight it could explode out in any direction at any second, then finally back to the girl’s gleaming red eyes.
“Teach her a lesson!”
Her hands were clammy.
“Give her the ol’ ONE-TWO!”
The sword’s weight seemed a hundred times more than what it had just a second ago.
“Snap her in two-no-THREE pieces!”
Blood was pumping in her ears.
“Turn RuBE into RuISN’T!”
Rue smirked.
The world seemed to freeze as a moment of silence descended upon her-
…
“Rule 3 of LiT.” Lucy sighed as she dropped her sword. “Don’t fight a battle you know you’ll lose.”
…
“”Huh?”” The two audience members questioned at the same time, their heads tilting in unison.
“Ha…” Rue’s smirk cracked, and slowly morphed into a full on grin. “Haha. HA! HAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!” She clapped her hands and had to steady herself to keep from falling over as she swayed. “Oh that- I didn’t expect that! Ha! That’s good! Oh Lord have mercy!” She wiped a tear from her eye.
“I was planning on withholding the items from our trip, killing you when you attacked me, stealing all your stuff, and starting a little rivalry that I could have all game. But this is hilariously better!”
“Booo.” Douglas and Lillie jokingly jeered from the side. “It was just getting good.” “I wanted a fight!”
“Oi, shut up you two.” Rue laughed as she walked back over to Lucy, and threw an arm around her. “Congrats kid, you’re officially smarter than 80% of the people who play this game, you’re no longer a complete newb!”
Before Lucy could respond, Rubie forcefully pulled out her hands, and dropped a pile of stuff into her arms.
Lucy blinked owlishly at the amount in front of her. “But wait, you said-”
“I know what I said.” The thief waved her off. “Think of this as a reward for putting up with me all day, and for deciding to not be stupid.”
It still wasn’t the equal amount that they’d originally agreed on, nowhere close, but it was much better than her first cut of the profit- IE: none.
Lucy hesitantly took it all into her inventory, and then turned to Rubie with the beginnings of a smile.
“Than-”
And then the world flashed white.
-Muted Infinity-
Lucy shook the blurriness from her head, trying to recover from the veritable flash bomb that had just assaulted her senses, but when she opened her eyes she was met by a sea of people.
Most of them were still in white shirts, with a few notable exceptions here and there from people who’d already progressed, but she couldn’t see anything else about them- her view was stopped at the shoulders, that's how many people there were, crammed shoulder to shoulder like sardines.
There were people standing on the ground, on top of walls, on balconies, on rooftops. People were everywhere, and all of them looked reasonably confused.
It was just like spawn if everyone had been dropped in at once, actually, no wait, it was spawn! It still looked like shit! The only difference was that people had flung up a bunch of ramshackle houses made of everything from wood to stone, that were all either incomplete… or just bad.
Or both.
A guy to her left snorted. “They probably called us all here to talk about the logout button issue.”
Lucy turned to him in confusion in time to catch another guy join in.
“Yeah, I mean, I get that there’s gonna be bugs, especially on the first day, but come on, for the logout button to not work? The jokes write themselves!”
“It’s not even that it doesn’t work, the thing’s just straight up not there. You have to actually put in effort to fuck up that bad. The devs are gonna be firing someone, and I wish I was there for that meeting- it’d be hilarious.”
The second guy laughed, then began speaking in an obviously fake lisp. “Gwuys, gwuys, yuo don’t get it! I akchually did it to enhance emmersion! Gwuys twust me!”
“Joe, you removed the fucking logout button.”
“Yeah, Yeah, b-but gwuys, my emmerwsion!”
Lucy tuned out the two guys as they descended into laughter, and began rapidly scrolling through her menu. And sure enough, while there were indeed a frankly absurd amount of buttons for game settings, none of them actually said the magic phrase.
[Logout]
But just as she was beginning to go through the list a second time. The hairs on her neck stood up, adrenaline flooded her veins, her stomach flipped, and every leftover piece from her species' inefficient evolution screamed at her fight or flight reflexes.
Her head shot up and her eyes widened in animalistic terror, as the space in front of her rent in two. There was static, incomprehensible noise, and colors that smelt like things she once remembered forgetting.
And then it was over, and Lucy, as well as every other person nearby, was left a mess.
Someone had just altered the world code while people’s dive sims were still getting feed from it- a very poor idea, and something that anyone with experience with full dive programming knew not to do.
The VR devices used to access the extranet were made to interpret virtual stimuli into physical stimuli, and relay it to the brain. For most things this worked fine, but when editing code of programs when people were in it, it was never fun. But that shouldn’t be surprising, anything plugged directly into your brain would probably be bad at relaying what “fundamental changes to reality” was supposed to feel like.
“Hello, everyone.”
A calm, monotone voice cut through the air, the system making it so it came from all around, and dragged everyone’s attention to the center of spawn, where there was now a large marble stage that very much hadn’t been there two seconds ago, with a big podium on top of it.
The man standing on the stage was very distinctive, even with how far away Lucy herself was from him.
He was tall, very tall, easily over six feet, with gangly long arms and legs, and a long lab coat that only accentuated his skeletal figure. He was slightly hunched over… kind of old looking, but he didn’t have any facial hair. The hair he did have however was all white, its color drained even past gray, but whenever Lucy blinked she could swear she could see hints of ghostly blue for a fraction of a second.
“My name is Doctor Howard R. Faust, head administrator of this simulation.”
The man spoke in a completely neutral voice, as if he hadn’t just dragged everyone in front of him, and then given them all a mini seizure by editing world code.
“You are the lucky few that have the privilege to leave a mark on history, greater than even the conquerors of old could possibly understand. This simulation, this experiment, will change the course of history, and set the stones that will become the foundation of humanity’s future! I cannot tell you the exact nature of this experiment’s goals, as that would ultimately undermine it, but I assure you, it is for the greater good.”
“Psst, hey is this supposed to be the game plot or something?” One of the men from earlier whispered, but Lucy ignored him.
“Now we do have some general purpose announcements that, even if you don’t care for my experiment, you’ll be very interested in hearing about as players of this ‘game’ of yours. As the few of you who paid attention have noticed, the logout button is absent from the menu. This is not a mistake, and is, in fact, an intentional choice we made. It is something we went out of our way to change after being ceded control over the game’s code.”
This caused confused muttering from all around, but Faust just continued.
“Another doubtlessly controversial decision we’ve made, in order to insure the seriousness that the experiment requires, is that you will no longer be able to set a respawn point. This is not something we’re denying you to make your life harder, but because the mechanic itself has now been disabled. Furthermore, my team has gone through great lengths to link the fatality system to your physical forms.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “If you die in this simulation, you will also die in real life.”
The muttering lulled before exploding back into volume, people loudly shouting in confusion.
This seemed to finally be too much for the doctor, and with a press of a button, everyone fell silent, even though their mouths were still moving. Lucy’s attention immediately beelined to the small picture of a microphone with a line through it that appeared on the bottom of her hud.
“Now, to expand upon that, and to dispel any doubts, allow me to remind you of several key facts that you all should know.”
Faust paused, seemingly to flip something on the podium. Wait- was he reading a script!?
“The dive interface you have equipped on the top of your neck, works by intercepting the signals your brain sends out, stops them from reaching your extremities, and translates that into virtual avatar movement. It can just as easily stop those same signals from telling your heart to beat, or your lungs to breathe.”
Another page flip.
“This, of course, would only be possible if someone was capable of bypassing or disabling the countless safety measures such devices have. Fortunately for our experiment, Lumina, the company that developed this title, is also the producer of the dive hardware necessary to access this simulation. And they have been convinced to not just bypass those measures, but turn them off entirely for us.”
Faust glanced up at them from his script and clicked another invisible button. The ‘muted’ icon disappeared from Lucy’s hud, but the mutter didn’t resume.
Everyone was dead quiet.
Faust nodded to himself and looked back to his podium.
“I understand that to many of you this is not the casual experience you expected when you created your accounts, and to help remedy this, you will be free to access and change your usernames to whatever you wish for the next twenty four hours. Additionally, I also understand that you have been pulled from whatever you were doing, back to where you started, with the night fast approaching, and without preparation. Therefore I will be reverting the simulation’s internal clock to mid day, so that none will have to trek through the dark and die, ultimately, because of outside interference.
“Your hud clock will also be adjusted to display the system’s world time, rather than standard time, to help you better adjust your sleep schedule to fit the new time table.
“If there are any other basic accommodations any of you need to help smooth the transition from a casual experience, to a more immersive one, the [contact moderator] button that was available to the beta testers will be made available for the next 48 hours. Feel free to contact them about any such accommodations that my team may have missed.”
Faust nodded and stepped off the podium, gathering his papers as he left.
“I thank you for your time and cooperation, and hope you are able to enjoy your game more, now that all monthly subscriptions have been removed. Have a good day.”
And just like that, with another burst of static, and inverted screams from the sights she should never have choked on, Dr Faust was gone.
…And then the screaming began.
-End Chapter-