I know it’s dangerous to self-diagnose, but because I might not be able to get a therapy appointment for weeks, I need to get more sleep until the end of this week off, an exhausted Karine falls on her bed, but somehow not visited by her characters that night, who are just as exhausted as she is. Then again, I called my characters hallucinations at times. Is it because I’m playing this game too much lately, as I always seem to do early in tiers’ life cycles?
The following day, after sleeping much more than in the previous days, she starts reading about potential causes of hallucinations. But since she doesn’t take alcohol, drugs or medication, she can rule these out. However, she doesn’t feel like she suffers from some neurodegenerative disease since she doesn’t feel like her intelligence has been affected.
“I guess, that’s as far as I can go in an attempt to determine whether I was hallucinating lately” a well-rested Karine sighs, feeling powerless over what she feels are hallucinations.
Speaking of hallucinations, both of her characters appear to her under the form of astral projections. Which makes her start streaming, hoping that maybe some viewer would help her determine whether these are hallucinations.
“Welcome to this new post-RWF stream, brought to you by Monseigneur Tanking. Today, we’ll have both characters I played during the race to world first” Karine opens her stream while she has yet to log into the game.
“Have you realized yet that we’re real people, but in a different world?” Clavet asks Karine, visibly annoyed.
“Yeah, we have killed Belzebuth, and infernal forces have left Gatwick too...” Monseigneur comments.
Viewers from around the world gasp in horror at Clavet’s statement regarding her claims about MAA players controlling residents of another world. As Karine logs into the game but has yet to choose a character:
“Karine, no! Don’t pick me!” Clavet pleads with her player.
“Me neither!” Monseigneur begs Karine not to log in on her.
“What you must realize is that what people in your world call dungeons or raids are actually inhabited by ghosts, with all the mannerisms and strength they had when they lived!” Clavet adds before Monseigneur whines.
“But these ghosts look so real to us!” Monseigneur retorts, before Karine logs on Clavet.
“Something doesn’t add up. Your world’s ghosts might hoard treasure, but where does the loot come from?” Karine asks her characters before choosing on whom to log in.
To that, even Clavet draws a blank, oblivious to the fact that both Monseigneur and herself are being watched.
Upon Karine logging in on Clavet, the latter’s astral projection disappears as Clavet’s angelic beacon is activated. Damn it! What’s happening to me? Clavet questions herself, quietly, as she loses control over her mind while, on Karine’s computer, the loading screen is active.
She realizes the alcohol witch is not at her player home, but rather at some hangar north of runway 9L/27R at Heathrow. And with some more Perserian rebels in tow.
“What’s going on here? Hangars on either side of Heathrow’s runways are supposed to be off-limits to players! On top of that, my character is not where I left her off!” Karine screams upon seeing Clavet in one of Heathrow’s northern hangars.
Often hallucinations seem to lack coherence; here it seems like my characters are much smarter than I would have expected out of mere hallucinations, Karine muses, while she seems to open up to the idea that maybe she didn’t hallucinate after all. Thank God intellect isn’t a stat of the game. Sure, Clavet makes me feel like she’s a genius by her world’s standards, but in other games where intellect is a stat, it seems like characters don’t actually act smarter as you go through their stories, or at least not at the pace gearing and leveling would imply.
The viewers realize by then that it’s more than simply the manufacturer losing control over debugging. They now ask Karine to tour areas as a preview of what’s to come in future patches.
“Karine, last night, when you were in bed, Clavet told me about the First Circle of Hell, so may I suggest that we go there, if possible?” Monseigneur suggests her.
“Wait a minute, First Circle of Hell? How many circles of hell are there in your world?” a confused Karine asks her bishop’s astral projection.
Is the First Circle of Hell going to be an open-world area or an “instance”, that is, a haunted place used for a dungeon or a raid? How much of each? Karine seems to have a lot on her mind about how this is going to play out. Starting with how to access the First Circle of Hell.
“How to get to hell from Heathrow then? Belzebuth must have had a route to get his troops to Heathrow and back, and Gatwick, too” Karine asks her character.
“We could always try Terminal Two; it’s the only terminal that isn’t haunted”
And, much to the delight of the viewers, Karine has Clavet tour Terminal 2 of this game’s version of Heathrow, with food, perfume, outfit and repair vendors on each floor. With, of course, the check-in counter being where they buy their tickets to hell, as well as a variety of other destinations in the game.
However, players are treated to a loading screen after their ticket is bought, much like any other long-distance travel in this game, after getting past security.
When they arrive in the First Circle of Hell, they arrive at another airport that feels like Paris Charles-de-Gaulle, and they disembark at what looks like Concourse 2F.
“Not impressed with this mechanic” a viewer tells her on her chat.
Upon leaving the airport, and into the First Circle of Hell itself, Karine realizes, on screen, that, unlike real-world CDG, the Acheron River lies directly outside the airport grounds. When her character sets foot in the outside world, she finds a wide variety of tormented souls in limbo. And these damned keep doing in hell what they did in life.
“I know what you did in Lower Perseria!” the tormented soul of a Perserian protester holds Clavet responsible for the deaths of homeless people in the lower city.
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“I was the one who was demanded justice for in Upper Perseria, not Clavet!” Monseigneur reminds Karine upon hearing the damned. “You see, astral projection is the only way we can communicate with your world, and, while it doesn’t use much of our mana...” the astral projection explains to Karine.
“And you can’t use it when the angelic beacon is activated...” Karine sighs.
“Exactly. I lose control over myself when the beacon is activated, and being in control is necessary to use astral projections”
And my brain works like crazy, too. I guess, it’s no use hiding our lives in our world to the public of Karine’s world, Monseigneur muses while she feels like Karine might acknowledge that she’s, in fact, real. Just from another world.
Karine is then bombarded with questions about the effects of the angelic beacon on player characters as viewers keep coming in. About what causes it to activate, the side effects of its use, its limitations and so on.
“Do you realize that, while we are under the effects of the angelic beacons, players have us commit atrocities in our world that we wouldn’t have otherwise?” Monseigneur asks people in the chat who play the game.
“While some players play this kind of game precisely for this reason, not everyone is playing to smash people left and right!” Karine retorts.
However, when she arrives at a location that she feels might have some sort of adventuring taking place in it, it gives her pause. Especially with a neon sign reading “Gehenna Grand Library” She enters it without having a clue of what to expect, except maybe for the place to be haunted.
What she finds is that, early on, the trash is made mostly of rats and worms. Then, rather than pulling the first boss, she has Clavet read an atlas of Hell, which is a clickable item, in hopes the alcohol witch could glean knowledge of the terrain in hell.
“What’s going on here? Are you leaking future content not yet on the public test server?” an employee of the manufacturer asks Karine on the chat, while scrolling up.
“No; I was victim of a bug and, when I logged in, I found my character in some hangar of Operation Heathrow that’s supposed to be off-limits to players!” Karine vehemently denies charges of leaking future content, while feigning ignorance of the First Circle of Hell. “I didn’t find other bugs yet, however”
“You were talking about how PCs wore angelic beacons on their middle fingers that can save them from the brink of death, but at the cost of brainwashing them while activated? That’s ridiculous!” the dev asks her on the chat, his anger not visible to other viewers.
Karine’s face turns bright red, feeling like telling publicly the cold, hard truth about the relationship between this world and MAA’s was too much for her to handle. And then she facepalms, feeling like what began as an attempt to sort out whether she’s hallucinating ended up angering the manufacturer. Especially since the devs seemed to be implying she leaked untested content. She abruptly cuts the stream:
“I didn’t expect to anger the manufacturer! I’ve never been this embarrassed in my life as a streamer!” Karine vents at Monseigneur as she has Clavet exit the library and subsequently logs out of the game. “What exactly took place in Lower Perseria that sparked protests in Upper Perseria?”
“Hostile ghosts used homeless as meat shields during a run of Lower Perseria. And it happened homeless were caught in a holy flare” Monseigneur explains to her.
“What you describe is a common occurrence in the game. Now I realize we players are controlling thousands among your world’s population. For once that you appeared when I wasn’t sleep-deprived!”
By then, this entire angelic beacon fiasco has become a meme on Reddit, and Karine is at the center of it. Even as the manufacturer’s workers attempt to reproduce the so-called bug that led to Clavet accessing the non-haunted parts of Heathrow, as well as a few areas within the First Circle of Hell.
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Speaking of angelic beacons, when Clavet’s gets deactivated, armed with a map of hell, she promptly returns to the Heathrow hangar she calls her rebel cell’s headquarters by taking another plane back to Heathrow.
“What news?” Yasama asks her, wondering what was happening, while Clavet lays down the foldable map of hell on a table.
“I have a plan, but we need more than one rebel cell to make this work: some of us will go to the First Circle of Hell to capture the Gehenna Grand Library, infested with vermin, making the main Perserian army believe we’re attacking the First Circle of Hell. Meanwhile, another force gets into position outside Perseria and storms the sewers of the city at night” Clavet explains to her fellow rebels. “At this point, however, the aim is not to establish a foothold in Hell, only to draw the enemy garrison away from the city”
“Do the Perserian army know about this airport?” Béteulle asks her.
“No. There are two or three details left to be sorted out with the other rebel cells, but the fastest option the enemy knows about is through the Gates of Tartarus, guarding the only land route to hell. However, we can’t afford to lose Heathrow since we’ll then lose the primary advantage we have over the enemy, so some of us should stay behind and guard it” Clavet harangues the other rebels.
Namely, airlift. But the Gates of Tartarus are of significant strategic importance for Hell, and so I would expect the Gates to be well-defended, Clavet muses while she tries to contact the other rebel cells to coordinate who will be assigned to which part of her plan. That said, there’s making a feint in Hell and there’s recapturing the city.
And even then, the rebel army is reinforced by soldiers who have axes to grind against the current regime in Perseria. Be it refugees or otherwise. And, of course, some prisoners and adventurers.
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Back in the players’ world, Karine finally brings herself to read online comments about the First Circle of Hell leak. Most of them are about potential actions the manufacturer could take, such as releasing the leaked content early, banning Karine from the game, or blasting the manufacturer for its incompetence.
Somehow, even when Karine publicly revealed the suffering of the player characters on a stream, their world’s plight falls mostly on deaf ears among the player base. Or what’s left of it, anyhow. So when she reads a private message from a player who, despite not being nearly as high-profile among the MAA community as she is, she feels happy. I suspected for years that we were toying with real people in another world, and, as such, treated my characters accordingly. But now that I have confirmation, I am convinced that only this game’s closure will save their world from ours, she reads from that player, Adèle.
“Was I really doing the right thing? I guess, I now know that I am not hallucinating, and the problems of MAA’s world are real, but at the same time, the manufacturer is doing everything in its power to keep the game in operation!” Karine starts sobbing. “I might have brought the world first on Operation Heathrow to Canada, but now that I know my life on Twitch is actually borne out of the suffering of people living in another world...”
As a licensed insolvency trustee, I deal with vulnerable clients, day in, day out. Until today, I treated my characters as showpieces and fighting machines, as if they were simply computer bits. However, I really wonder what can my characters do to free their world. It’s clear by now that I had my characters commit atrocities they wouldn’t otherwise, doing horrible things to vulnerable people in another world, Karine’s thoughts seem to be wandering around as she tries to think about what power do the characters really have on the game’s manufacturer. Other than doing things that could be construed as more bugs, I guess... and then the players would lose faith in the game, along with the manufacturer.
“I might be wondering why is it that it’s only with this patch that player characters started gaining the ability to project astral projections across worlds...” Karine keeps lamenting because something just doesn’t feel right. “People now know about how our characters feel as we play them! But I wouldn’t have had that opportunity to do so if I wasn’t a streamer, and I wouldn’t have been such a high-profile streamer if my gameplay skill was deemed unsatisfactory by the public!”
MAA, more than perhaps any other MMO, is a game whose viewers gravitate towards the streamers who know what they’re doing in-game. They stand out like sore thumbs, since most MAA streamers can’t touch high-end content, even with a ten-foot pole. Now, watching a ranged tank raid would feel mostly like watching a ranged DPS, only with the boss facing you, Karine keeps comments about MAA’s streaming scene to herself.