We landed in the middle of a stuffy bustling city, smog painted the sky a dull grey and the engines of cars polluted the air with their incessant noise. “Welcome to, well, its probably better if you don’t know where we are.” She said as she started into a building and up a flight of stairs.
“What are we doing here?” Abe demanded, but his question fell on death ears. The three of stood in concert for a moment, “Are we really going to follow this girl around hoping that she answers our questions?”
“Why not, we weren’t exactly doing fine on our own.” Jacob replied in earnest.
“For now,” I supposed, “We owe her that much.”
“What do you mean ‘owe her’?” Abe asked, almost insulted.
“I mean,” I asserted, “that this girl saved us and you from getting killed-”
“Are you coming?” She called back at us.
“Yeah,” I called forward and started walking up to the door, I looked back at Abe who was standing indignantly, “I’m not doing this without you.” I said to him.
Jacob chuckled, and followed after me while Abe reluctantly joined too. The three of us walked up the stairs into a cramped apartment, it wasn’t well insulated, meaning that all the smells and sounds from the outside seemed to violate the innermost parts of the dwelling place. At the same time it was very bare bones. Half the room was filled with some kind of machine, the girl gestured towards it “Backup battery, we don’t want to get stranded.” In the centre of the room was a computer that had a game of Garry’s mod on.
The girl walked straight into the computer screen which seemed to suck her up, shocked I look over at the amazed Jacob and the bewildered Abe. “Well that’s just the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” I unintentionally said out loud.
“Really?” Jacob said, “We met Ganondorf today.” As he started to walk towards the computer, he touched the screen it rippled at his touch before sucking him into the game.
“Well I guess we’re going to Garry’s mod.” I said as I walked over to the screen myself and saw it open up into some kind of portal. It was nothing like the way it looked like earlier as I entered the computer.
[You have received the sub-skill, Gamers Plug-In]
[You have received the sub-skill, Gamers Plug-Out]
[A skill has levelled up, The Gamer is now level three! All Gamer related sub-skills have received a boost.]
With that my vision blurred until finally I found myself somewhere completely different. I looked around, the sky was dull and blue and oddly enough there wasn’t any wind. On top of that, there was the ground, it felt flat to the tough yet it was textured in a way that would make me think otherwise. “So this what its like to be inside a game?”
“Not all games, just this one Garry’s mod and most older games.” The girl from earlier called back as she walked onward towards a the castle ahead of us.
After a moment Abe appeared next to me, “Took your time.” Jacob said as he started following the lead of the girl ahead of us.
“Fine,” Abe conceited.
“We both know you’re enjoying the hell out of this.” I commented as I walked with him.
When we entered the castle a older man greeted us, he didn’t speak but nodded at us individually as we entered. The man was definitively middle aged, has strangely pointy ears, blue eyes, hazelnut hair that seemed discoloured by time, and fair skin. He was tall, shorter than Abe but still taller than me or Jacob, and he only had one arm. I tried not to stare at his unfortunate disfigurement. Floating around him was a thin blue sparkling creature, who was glowing with such luminosity that the only features I could make out was the bug-like wings that it used to fly about his head.
The creature spoke for him in a high-pitched and incredibly annoying voice. “Hey listen, Welcome to our home.” She (I assume it’s a she) said.
The girl made the master sword appear out of nowhere, more than likely producing it from her own inventory, and handed it to the gentlemen.
“Thanks for letting me borrow her.” She said as the sword while passing the sword. The man nodded. “Oh,” She said, as if remembering that we were there, “Everyone, this is Li-“
“Hoooly…” I began, was he worked his way through the word his voice got higher until he seemed to loose his breath altogether leaving me standing there staring at the hero of time with his mouth gapped open. Abe on the other hand sealed up his lips tightly, no doubt afraid of somehow insulting the Hero.
At the same time Jacob of all people managed to find his composer, “Cool, How you doing Link, I’m Jacob.” He moved in to shake the mans hand and Link returned the gesture.
With that meeting out of the way both Abe and I managed to calm down and introduce ourselves properly, while being completely red in the face.
“Oh right, I forgot,” The girl started again, “I’m Harriot, apparently we grew up in the same town, strange how we never met.”
“Different schools.” Jacob gave the excuse, while looking at us with the most devilish of expressions. The hot girl didn’t remember you, that’s what that expression said, and I was ready to kill him for it.
“Anyway,” She pushed forward, “You properly want some kind of explanation, unfortunately I’m really bad at those, so come over to the balcony and I’ll introduce you to someone a little better.”
Jacob was happy to follow along while Abe and myself were more than a little dazed, we could have followed anyone at that point and sure enough Harriot led us through the elaborate stone corridors of the castle.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Finally, after a flight of stairs or two, we find ourselves facing a humanoid goat, wearing a blue dress, “Toriel?” Abe asked in surprise.
“Hello my dears.” She looked at us all.
“Harriot, are these the new requites?” She asked.
“That’s right.” Harriot said while leaving, “They’ll need to know everything.”
“Right,” Toriel began. The balcony overlooked the blank area in front of the castle, which apparently took up most of the map which seemed like a bit of a shame.
“So I’ll get started, I suppose we should get the boring topics out of the way.” Toriel started to say.
Jacob spent most of the time staring back at the door mourning Harriots departure. Abe focused intently on Toriel, the goat woman was a vital part in the beginning of Undertale and so it made sense that the same would be true here, so I also decided to ignore Jacob and focus on the subject at hand.
“First off, there has been hundreds of updates to the Gamer skill that you three posses, the original version being nearly forty years old and it allowed the user to play pong with their minds alone.” Toriel said in a motherly tone, as if reading us a bed-time story, she continued in the same fashion, “At some point after nineteen seventy six, the Gamer skill received an update that allowed the user to physically enter a game, once inside a game, that copy would be recreated as an independent and living reality,” Toriel gestured around us giving the world we are in as an example, “However the rules for each game work differently, with time and space being particularly odd in some games,” Toriel looked at each of us in turn to see if we understood, and Jacob was apparently a convincing enough actor for her to push on, “Prior to that an update allowed people with the Gamer skill to share their powers with others and so with both updates in effect, Gamers around the world started meeting and sharing their power with video game characters. As each copy of a game is considered separate, it allowed for millions of versions of the same character, and with them gaining the power of the Gamer, video game characters where able to leave their respective games and enter others-” Toriel sniffed at the air. “Oh no, my pie!” She said startled and started running off, we didn’t smell anything, but after that explanation I welcomed the time to digest the information.
“I get it,” Abe said, “So with villains in video games with the power of the Gamer, they probably started teaming up in order to further their own goals and eventually…”
“What,” I asked, “take over the world?”
“I guess so,” Abe supposed, “That’s what villains usually do right?”
We started walking out of the balcony into a corridor, Jacob started looking at us, “You guys actually got all that?”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you were paying attention.” I replied.
“I tuned in, it sounded really confusing though so I tuned back out.” He said, “I guess it doesn’t matter as long as you guys understand.”
“So where did Toriel go?” I asked only for Abe to shrug at me, the got woman ran away surprisingly quickly.
We continued walking around the Castle, occasionally meeting characters from games and nerded out over them. When we finally found Toriel in the castles kitchen, a place we where only able to find thanks to directions from Conker the Squirrel. In which Toriel seemed surprised to see us, “I heard you were coming and wanted to make a butterscotch pie for you all.” She said, placing a baked pie on one of those little wooden triangles as it cooled down, “Its too hot to eat now so I suppose we can continue our discussion.” She said,
“I’m really sorry, but I’m allergic to butter.” I confessed. This seemed to hit Toriel like a slap in the face, but she quickly recovered to her regular demeanour.
“Don’t worry dear, it’s my fault, I should have asked before hand,” She pressed on with her expositional discussion, “Now, with Villains from video games cheating people into giving them the Gamer skill, it became apparent to them that they are unable to directly influence the real world, so that’s why they need people like you,” She gestured to the three of us, “Gamers who can further their currently unknown goals. Currently they operate as a single organisation known as Organization thirteen-”
“That’s pretty cool,” Jacob interrupted, then Toriel gave him a disappointed look and he apologised, “Sorry, please continue.”
“Right, Organization thirteen are a group of boss monsters that have been gathering in numbers since the original Ganon, gained the gamer skill, the main objective seems to be gathering power, their reason behind doing so has yet to be discovered.” She concluded, “For now, I suppose I should help you find people to train you, so that you can protect yourselves from their forces, in this version of Garry’s Mod time is stationary, you can technically spend hours or days here without aging or growing and leave the game without more than a couple minutes having passed in the real world, so we can ‘figuratively’ take our time.”
“Well that’s confusing, How does that work?” Abe asked.
“I don’t know?” She said in earnest, “Now that that’s out of the way, who can guess the forty two uses of a snail?”