The recruiting station was so packed with new players, it was hard to believe the building was the size of a real-world city block. A severe, concrete structure with exposed beams and cables — kinda like a massive hollow cube. The scale and style hit me like a gut punch after walking in from the lush gardens and view of the stars.
It's like the recruiting station was all business. They'd assailed my senses outside, and now it was time to direct my focus squarely on one objective: the game.
That didn’t mean the building lacked its own stunning sights, though. When I first walked in, a giant holographic RedDev logo hovered in the lobby’s expansive space. Paper-thin video monitors hung from the walls like fifty-foot tapestries, each streaming a player’s POV from inside the game. Every one strobed with muzzle flashes and tracer rounds. About halfway through my walk to the desk marked ‘Registration’, an explosion filled one of the screens and bathed the entire lobby in a red and yellow glow.
The spectacle was enough to make hundreds of people — including me — stop and look up. When the fire and smoke cleared, the screen showed a pile of bodies and limbs around a smoking crater. I didn’t care about the carnage. My eyes fixed on the glowing symbols hovering over the battlefield. The orange, purple, and green icons were Drops.
Loot. The stuff we were all signing up for.
A cheer surged from the crowd around me. I joined the roaring and clapping that shook the recruiting center itself. My fellow noobs clearly didn’t care that there was no one left alive on the video stream to claim the glowing treasures — and neither did I. It was like we were already brainwashed, indoctrinated into that ‘kill-loot-repeat’ dopamine loop that we all paid good money for.
After the uproar, it was like someone had fired a starter pistol. Noobs who’d been standing around watching the screens or lounging around the lobby rushed Registration. And even though the lines instantly filled up, they cleared twice as fast.
Fortunately, patience was my virtue. Possibly my only virtue, depending on who you ask. I didn’t rush the desk, so I didn’t have to deal with the trampling and fist fights that broke out in the commotion. At one point, a guy took so many punches to the face that he gave up and logged off — a downside to being invulnerable during the character creation process, I ‘spose.
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By the time my turn came, everything was back to civility. I stepped forward, confirmed that I was the one and only SilkyKD, and headed for a medical exam as instructed.
The decor was about the same on the other side of Registration. Concrete, metal, and monitors, with the only standout addition being a trio of glass display cylinders that ran along a bottleneck in the walkway. Each one featured a mannequin in a top-tier gear set from one of the three corporations we’d be choosing from.
The first was Akhur Industries, made obvious because of the Ancient Egyptian details that marked their specialty gear. Nothing so garish as a Pharaoh headdress or anything, but the glowing hieroglyphics and huge Eye of Ra symbol on the chest armor were a dead giveaway.
Next up was the Krieger Corporation's display. They had a sort of dieselpunk, sci-fi mashup aesthetic that worked for me. I liked the dark browns and grays of the uniform, and the trench coat and helmet that looked like a gas mask from the 1920s just made it even better.
Sadly, the rest of my clan — if you can call three semi-casual gamers who used to work together a clan — had already joined the third option: the Ouroboros Association. This was a high-tech corporation with a boring backstory about exploration and science. Their mannequin was dressed in a sort of sleek tactical uniform with a lot of glowing circles that — in my mind — would just make the wearer a huge target.
Still, I was stuck with it. Jim and Tony had already been grinding away as Ouroboros mercs for a few weeks, so I didn’t get a vote.
Taking a final, flat look at my future uniform, I stepped off toward medical. Inside the examination area, I went through a scanning process that was largely set dressing for changing my appearance. Sure, RedDev collected medical data for player safety, but this was really about making my avatar taller or enhancing the bulge in his pants.
I did both. I kept my face the same, though. And there was no way I was changing the shaggy black mohawk that was the closest thing I had to a signature look.
Once cleared, I was sent to the final step — choosing the faction that I’d be sworn to for the rest of my time in the game. The medical center opened up to a wide atrium with three huge doors opposite. One for each faction, and all three were appropriately stylized with the aesthetic of their corporation.
In front of each door was a counter manned by in-game moderators and NPCs who helped players choose their allegiance. The one good thing about not having a choice was that I could bypass the crowd of noobs asking questions and go straight to the Ouroboros door.